


call to me with words i never knew

by forsanethaec



Series: call to me with words i never knew [1]
Category: Social Network (2010)
Genre: Alternate Reality, Alternate Universe - Canon, Angst, Bromance, Community: tsn_kinkmeme, Fluff, Humor, M/M, OT4, Post-Movie, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-12
Updated: 2011-09-12
Packaged: 2017-10-23 16:23:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 43,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/252385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forsanethaec/pseuds/forsanethaec
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Mark learns how to make a friend, and then learns a little more. (AU)</p>
            </blockquote>





	call to me with words i never knew

**Author's Note:**

> originally written for [this](http://tsn-kinkmeme.livejournal.com/4426.html?thread=5949002#t5949002) kinkmeme prompt, which asked for the boys meeting for business reasons once mark was already CEO and eduardo, much to mark's confusion, wanting to be BFFs. all my love to this wonderful fandom and everyone who followed this when it was a wip!! thanks to M for the beta and hand-holding. title from iron & wine's "belated promise ring."

They are at dinner. Not _a_ dinner – just _dinner_. Mark has to keep reminding himself of the difference. He has never been to a non-business function with a business-related person before.

The investor is tall and dark and ridiculous. He's built lean, like he isn't meant to ever wear anything but well-tailored suits, and he's cradling the wine list with a practiced hand and saying something cheerily unintelligible. Mark isn't in flip-flops, but it was a close thing. He's been trying all day to figure out why this guy would be even remotely interested in doing anything with him besides signing whatever papers investors sign and getting back on his airplane, and so far, the list is empty. Mark's mental cursor is blinking steadily on a blank screen.

"If I got a bottle of the Brumont, would you help me finish it?" The investor's name, Mark is fairly certain, is Eduardo, and he wants to split a bottle of red wine with Mark. At least, Mark's pretty sure that's a red. He raises an eyebrow.

"Yeah," he says.

"Great!"

Eduardo flags down their waiter and orders their wine. Mark watches, his face flat, and then Eduardo turns back to him.

"So, Mark," he says, fingering his fork, "I guess you don’t usually do this."

"What?"

"Have dinner with investors." Eduardo's eyes are sparkling a bit like he's smiling, but his mouth is still set low in that politely curious curve. Mark wonders how he does that, smile without needing to use his mouth.

He takes a sip of his water. "Not unless someone tells me to," he says. "Or unless the investor asks." He inclines his glass to Eduardo. "And you're the first one who's asked." He frowns slightly. Eduardo really is smiling a little now, and it takes Mark a moment's consideration to decide he's not being mocked. "Which I'm still not sure why you did."

Eduardo shrugs, leans back. "You're an interesting guy, aren't you?" he asks, like he just wants confirmation. Mark shrugs in kind.

"Sometimes I find that keeping everything strictly business can be stifling," Eduardo says after a thoughtful pause, drawing a finger through the condensation on his water glass. "You need to let a relationship breathe."

 _Relationship_ , Mark thinks drily.

"Or, at least, it lets me see the part of you that isn't all business." Mark can tell Eduardo would be winking here if he was a little less classy. "If that part exists."

"Guess you'll have to see for yourself," Mark says. He isn't trying to be coy; he actually doesn't know for sure either way. He can tell Eduardo thinks this is adorable, though, and he's not sure what to make of that.

The wine comes. Mark takes two long sips as soon as the waiter's finished pouring it. It's very good, good enough to make him a little nervous, and he can see Eduardo watching him. Great. That helps a lot.

Eduardo swirls his glass around, sniffs it and takes an appraising sip. Mark wonders if he really knows anything about wine, or if he's only doing it that way because he knows you ought to, the way Mark would probably do. He guesses the former, but something about it still looks learned. He files that away as another question he'll probably never ask.

"So," he says, uncomfortable in the brief silence – and that's weird, it's all weird, he never cares about silence or other people's personal histories or the way they drink their wine – "what do you think of the company?"

"The company?" Eduardo laughs, and Mark's a tiny bit taken aback. "The company's great. Really, it is. My money's in good hands."

"Good to hear," Mark says, and he means it. He feels like Eduardo is talking straight with him, for some reason, and he doesn't often get that impression from investors. Or from anyone, really, except Chris and Dustin. Certainly not from Sean. He isn't nineteen anymore, and he's learned to be a little wary of people who seem too good to be true.

Which is why he's suddenly very conscious of how it feels to be around Eduardo, because Eduardo really does seem perfect – even though that's a ridiculous thing to think, but there it is – and he likes Mark, and he's buying him good wine and talking, amiably, just chatting now about nothing, and Mark doesn't feel compelled to look away from his face.

He tunes back in, deciding to ignore this problem for the time being. Eduardo is talking about the differences between the wine in California and in Brazil.

"You're from there?" Mark asks.

"Saõ Paulo," Eduardo says. "Have you ever been?"

Mark shakes his head. "Though I think we have an office there," he adds as an afterthought.

Eduardo laughs again. Mark never knew he was so goddamn funny.

"You've got to stop thinking about the company for one second," Eduardo says. He raises his glass and considers Mark for a moment, mouth quirked. "To life outside Facebook," he says finally.

Mark has spent a lot of drunken nights clinking solo cups with Chris and Dustin, and he's never toasted to anything so outrageous in his life.

***

"I don't know," Mark says, throwing up his hands defensively and sloshing a little of his beer over his knuckles in the process. He did have a respectable amount of wine at dinner, and now Chris and Dustin seem to think that by plying him with more alcohol they'll be able to coax nonexistent details out of him.

"There must have been a _reason_ ," Chris says.

"Yeah, I mean, who would want to go out to dinner with _you_?" Dustin says, snickering, and Mark knows that he's joking, but at the same time it's obviously the heart of the matter. Mark doesn't really have an answer himself.

"Did he just want to talk Facebook?" Chris asks, as though this would be a plausible excuse.

"Not really." Mark takes a swig of beer. "We just talked." _It was nice_ , he thinks but doesn't say, because the mere fact that that sentence occurred to him is enough to make him wonder whether he's fallen into some kind of alternate universe.

"Did you get digits?" Dustin asks, grinning.

"Yes," Mark says churlishy.

"Well, tell him to come hang out sometime, if he's so interested," Chris says, shrugging, still wearing a slightly confused frown. "He's, what, a year older than us?"

"Yeah."

"Must have his shit together," Dustin says, raising an eyebrow.

Mark shrugs.

He waits until Chris and Dustin have gone home to get his phone out, and he spends a good deal of time staring at it before tapping out, _you play halo? how about friday_ , and hitting send before he can second guess.

He gets a response as he's falling into bed half an hour later: _sure. beck's ok?_

He has to give Eduardo credit, he thinks as he texts back _cool_ , for not being the kind of guy who would add a smiley face.

***

Halo and Beck's on Friday at Mark's place goes remarkably, almost inconceivably well. Mark keeps getting caught giving Eduardo a sort of shocked and incredulous stare. It's a little embarrassing, but he can't help it. He's just not used to someone being so unfazed by him.

"You'll have to excuse Mark," Dustin says to Eduardo. "We don't let him out very often."

The death glare Mark shoots Dustin over Eduardo's shoulder is only half-hearted, because Dustin is right in what he was implying, which is that Mark has no clue how to go about making a new friend. Shit, he just never wanted one, ever, and everybody knows it. The real question is why Eduardo doesn't seem to give a fuck.

Eduardo hasn't played Halo since college – Dartmouth, he admits a little sourly, his father's choice – because he hasn't been living like a man-child since then, unlike Dustin, Mark and Chris (in that order), but he picks it back up quick enough. They blow through the two six-packs he brought, and he grins carelessly when Dustin, as Dustin is wont to do, floats the idea of shots.

"Sometimes in this business it's tough to remember that I'm 24," he says, and the look he gives them is so patently grateful that Mark almost feels bad for him.

Soon enough, Eduardo starts speaking presumably profane Portuguese to the Halo people on the headset, and it has Dustin and Chris laughing their asses off even though they can't understand a word he's saying. Mark stares around at them all, bemused. He kind of likes this foursome thing. It's new and different and fun, and Mark, for all his faults, has never been one to turn down that combination.

***

Mark spends all weekend coding after that because he hasn't thought about doing so any of the times he's been around Eduardo and that scares him a little. It's good to sit at the keyboard for hours again, shut into tunnel vision – he has people to do this for him now, of course, and he can't pretend he and Dustin are sharing all the work anymore like at Harvard. But he stays up all night on Saturday anyway, typing without stopping, savoring that familiar hazed-out hyperfocused feeling.

He lets himself get wrapped in the characters on the screen without thinking about anything — the money, or the Winklevii, or the media appearances, or Eduardo slapping him on the back at four a.m. Friday night as he made his way to Mark's guest bedroom, too drunk to drive.

Mark had woken groggy on Saturday and stumbled out into the hall, following the smell of coffee from places unknown. Eduardo's face in the kitchen had been a momentary shock, and then confusing, and then for some reason it had made Mark feel odd, unfamiliar, kind of knotted up inside. Eduardo, bustling around Mark's kitchen in borrowed sweats and last night's dress shirt, had somehow looked so much different than Chris or Dustin doing the same.

Mark blinks. His fingers have stalled on the keyboard, and he's staring fixedly at the cork from the bottle of wine they'd shared at dinner earlier that week, the Brumont. Eduardo had pressed it happily into his hand afterward, and now it sits perched on top of one of the speakers.

Mark shakes himself and goes back to work, taking a wide-eyed swig of Red Bull and pinching himself on the wrist to stay on task. That had been an odd digression, he thinks, but by hour twenty-six it's out of his mind.

***

He slouches into work on Monday morning, still deep in his sleep deficit but well-practiced at dealing with that, and he doesn't glance left or right the entire way along the familiar route through the bullpen, which takes him by Chris and Dustin's stations, still unoccupied this early.

He gets all the way to the door of his glass-walled office before he sees Eduardo sitting on the edge of his desk.

Eduardo waves, kicking his legs. Mark pushes the door open.

"Hi," Eduardo says.

"Hi," Mark says cautiously. "Can I help you?"

Eduardo's smile flickers briefly, and it's with slight bemusement that he says, "Just saying hi."

"Hi," Mark says, flicking an eyebrow, and he goes and sits behind his desk and lays his fingers on the keyboard out of habit, even though he hasn't thought of what he has to do today yet.

Eduardo swings his legs around so that he's facing Mark, and only when he speaks a long moment later does Mark realize Eduardo's been studying him this whole time.

"Drinks tonight?"

Mark looks up. Eduardo's voice is kind of soft – like he wants to land the question gently, like he's not sure what answer he'll get.

"Yeah," Mark says blankly.

"You can bring Chris and Dustin."

"Okay."

Eduardo's still looking at him, his smile tiny in his mouth and brighter in his eyes. It's the kind of affectionate, unsure look Mark most often gets from his mother and he has no idea how to return it. He nudges his mouse and the computer screen comes to life. Emails from his assistant, revised wireframes for the redesign, brainstorming for names of new features. He looks back up at Eduardo.

"Okay," Eduardo says. He's still wearing that little smile, and he hops off the desk. "I'll call you tonight."

Mark nods and turns back to the screen.

"Bye, Mark," Eduardo says, off-handed, as he's pushing open the door.

"Bye, Wardo," Mark says to his screen.

Eduardo stops and turns. He blinks at Mark a couple of times, one hand on the door handle, until finally Mark looks up at him.

"What?"

"Nothing," Eduardo says, and he's smiling full-on now, shaking his head. "Nothing."

And he leaves.

Mark feels the presence of that smile in the room for the rest of the day, like a shaft of sunlight through the window. He finds himself humming later, and he goes red, even though he's alone.

***

The thing about Eduardo is that Mark really has not been able to trace the origins of his interest. As far as Mark knows, he doesn't put off any vibes like he's looking for a friend. In fact, he's fairly sure he puts off the opposite. And yet here they are – drinks on a Monday night, and his shoulders half-stiff as Eduardo throws an arm around them in the bar and Chris and Dustin order Jägerbombs, and he only met this guy a week ago and this is really pushing the limits of what he's able to understand.

Mark prattles drunkenly on for a while about how he thinks he'll probably go on a coding bender for a day or two starting tomorrow morning, because it's been a while since he did that, even though it hasn't but it feels like it, and the wireframes look like shit and he wants to throw them out. Eduardo nods like he understands, and he listens, and he lets Mark talk, which Mark guesses he appreciates.

Mark knows that if he was Eduardo he wouldn't be retaining any of this, so it comes as something of a surprise when at two a.m., Eduardo nudges him in the ribs and says, "Want to get going?"

"What?" They're shouting over the noise of the bar.

"You should sleep," Eduardo says, downing the rest of his drink in one swallow, chin tipped up. "You said you were gonna stay up after tomorrow morning."

"Oh," Mark says. He considers this. "Uh, okay." Chris and Dustin are still going strong, but Mark hasn't really invested in raging tonight. He's just drinking and standing around and yelling. It's like this a lot.

"Okay," Eduardo says. The volume of the conversation is making everything sound a lot more exciting than it is. "We're taking off," he yells in Chris and Dustin's general direction, and Mark's suddenly aware of a congenial palm against the middle of his back. He holds still.

Chris waves, grinning, and yells, "See ya!" Dustin is laughing uncontrollably into Chris' shoulder, but he kind of flings a hand at them in farewell.

Eduardo steers Mark out of the bar.

The night is seasonably warm, the sky starless and the yards on either side of them loud with crickets. Mark likes California, because he likes not having to worry about the difference between indoor and outdoor. He doesn't have to pay attention here when he moves from one place to another.

He shoves his hands in his hoodie pockets, weaving a little. Eduardo isn't saying anything, but the silence feels companionable. This isn't a new concept to Mark – he's always perfectly fine not to talk – but he'd grown used to Eduardo trying to fill these spaces. Actually, now that he thinks about it, it's kind of strange that he isn't.

"Hey," he says, quietly, glancing over at Eduardo. He's just prompting him.

Eduardo makes a noncommittal sort of face, glancing at Mark and smiling briefly, and then sort of chuckling to himself. He has a look of drunk concentration that Mark knows well – like he's gearing up to say something he considers to be very grand and serious, but he hasn't quite sorted the words out yet.

They keep walking in silence for a while, and Mark thinks about the May air on his face and how fluffy and ridiculous Eduardo's hair is getting in the breeze.

"So," he says finally, as the thought occurs to him and before he remembers that Eduardo had seemed to be on the verge of speaking, "I don't think I understand why you're doing this."

Eduardo just looks at him.

"Walking you home?"

"No," Mark says shortly, and he thinks, _you are?_ because he guesses he just thought Eduardo lived over this way.

"You mean like hanging out with you?"

Mark shrugs, averting his eyes. He wishes already that he hadn't started this conversation. The portion of him that cares, that's paying attention – and it's a larger portion than he's quite willing to admit – doesn't want this thing with Eduardo to crumble under scrutiny.

Eduardo's smiling, though. "I like you," he says, like he's announcing it. Like that's the easiest thing in the world to say out loud to someone, to mean hardly anything by, to just mean, and that's all. Mark looks at him and then looks quickly away again.

Eduardo nudges him gently with his shoulder and they both trip over their own feet. Eduardo laughs, soft. The sound makes the tension in Mark's shoulders ease a little.

"You're not the same—" Eduardo starts, and he furrows his brow, the drunken loss for words returning. "The same as my usual friends."

Mark concentrates on keeping one foot in front of the other. It feels like they've been walking very fast for a long time, but in reality they're kind of strolling, and he doesn't feel much of a rush, to be honest.

"My usual friends," and Eduardo sniffs, or maybe hiccups, "are businesspeople." Mark thinks about saying something about how he is a businessperson but he knows he'd just get a well-deserved pitying look at that. "And they're not…"

There's a shadow across his face for a moment, and Mark remembers when he'd said that thing during Halo about forgetting sometimes that he's 24.

Finally, Eduardo shrugs. "They're just not like you." He smiles triumphantly. "There. Your turn."

"My turn what?" Mark says. They make a turn – Mark's street. He hadn't noticed. It's five houses down to his house, and he realizes he's slowing slightly, trying to prolong things. He wonders if Eduardo's going to want to stay over again or if he's just going to drop him off.

"Your turn about why you're hanging out with me," Eduardo says.

"Because you're hanging out with me," Mark says blankly. He knows it sounds evasive, but he can't think how he would put it another way. He braces for Eduardo to try another angle, to attempt to draw some imagined emotion out of Mark. It's what people always do. It's why he doesn't like people, for the most part.

But the other angle doesn't come. Eduardo's just smiling at him, a little wobbly. Eduardo always seems to be smiling at him. When they'd first met, Mark had been inclined to let it unnerve him, but by now he's used to it, which is nice.

They're at his door, and he steps onto his front stoop, looking questioningly at Eduardo.

Eduardo glances around, grins, and says, "Oh." He bursts out laughing, and Mark smiles a little, feeling warm. "I don't know why I didn't go home," Eduardo says, grinning. "I just followed you."

"You can have the guest room again if you want," Mark says, and Eduardo troops inside after him like they've been doing this for years.

***

Unlike last weekend, Mark's very aware of Eduardo's presence in the house as soon as he opens his eyes on Tuesday morning. Still, he showers and dresses and generally prepares himself to stay at the office for at least the next 36 hours. He feels slightly more human afterward as he pads down the hall to wake Eduardo.

Mark knocks hesitantly on the closed door of the guest room, and when there's no answer he opens it slowly, peering in. Bright white morning sunlight is edging between the slats of the blinds, and Eduardo is twisted in the sheets with his face mashed into a pillow, one arm thrust beneath it. He's wearing the same pair of Mark's sweatpants he had borrowed last time, but he's folded his dress shirt neatly on the floor by the bedside table. The corner of Mark's mouth twitches. Eduardo sleeps like a college student.

"Eduardo," he says. Eduardo doesn't stir, so Mark steps all the way into the room, feeling heinously awkward, and lays a hand on Eduardo's duvet-clad side.

"Hey, Wardo," he says, a little louder.

Eduardo stirs, and then opens his eyes, inhaling sharp through his nose. He looks up blearily at Mark.

"What time is it?" he yawns.

"I'm going to work," Mark says.

Eduardo squeezes his eyes shut and pushes his face into the pillow as he stretches. "Should eat something," he mutters, muffled.

Mark blinks. "Okay," he says.

"I'm coming," Eduardo grumbles, even though Mark isn't trying to get him to do anything. He leads the way down the hall to the kitchen, rubbing the back of his neck, and Mark follows, bemused.

He leans in the doorframe and watches Eduardo putter in his kitchen, making coffee, pouring cereal. Eduardo looks at home here, even if it is only his second visit. He looks more at home here than Mark thinks he himself ever has.

Eduardo sits on the counter and Mark leans against the fridge as they eat in sleepy silence.

"You still planning to stay up, then?" Eduardo says after a while.

"Yeah," Mark says around his spoon.

Eduardo nods and shrugs in a _well, nothing I can do about that_ sort of way.

"Here," he says when Mark sets his empty bowl in the sink and goes for the coffee. He rummages for a moment until he finds a travel mug, dumps Mark's coffee into it and hands it back to him.

"Thanks, mom," Mark says. He thinks Dustin probably would have said _thanks, honey_ , but for him it would have felt weird. Eduardo laughs, though, and watches Mark reach for the sugar. Mark has a strange feeling that Eduardo's counting the spoonfuls – not because he disapproves, but because he wants to know for next time.

A small part of Mark, hidden in a place he's only vaguely aware of, is smiling at the thought of someone knowing how to keep him functioning, for when he forgets. He doesn't require much – just a lot of sugar in his coffee, and a reminder to go to bed occasionally and maybe a person to stand in the kitchen and eat cereal with, if he's lucky. It's different than a roommate. It feels more solid, in a way that's unfamiliar but that Mark is starting to think he would like to get to know.

***

Eduardo lets him be as he sits silent in his office and codes through the evening and into the night. There isn't anything investor-y happening at the office today – there wasn't the last time Eduardo was here, either, but Mark still takes note of his absence. He likes to be able to anticipate things if there's a chance they might have a pattern.

He gets a text around 1:30 in the morning.

_still at it?_

Eduardo. He texts back, _yeah._

The response is quick: _wow you weren't kidding. shit, i'm going to bed, have fun_

 _i'll be here in the morning,_ he replies.

 _you're ridiculous. night,_ Eduardo says.

His phone buzzes one more time, twenty minutes later: _don't work too hard_

It makes Mark smile. It's the first time he's stopped seeing lines of code branded onto the insides of his eyelids since this morning, and he coasts for a while after that, typing steadily, Red Bull forgotten on the corner of his desk.

***

Sometimes it stuns Mark that he's only known Eduardo for a few weeks. Maybe he's not used to making friends who aren't abject nerds just like him; maybe he's out of practice. But he thinks Eduardo's worked harder than people usually do.

He wonders sometimes if his reputation preceded him.

But that doesn't matter, because Eduardo's here now and things are turning out the way they are, regardless of how they got started.

And the way things are – they're easy, and simple, and they don't come with any caveats. Not yet, anyway. Eduardo does say things sometimes, deliberately nonspecific nods to his family that come with a brief darkening of his eyes. Eduardo has a very expressive face, in a way Mark's never noticed in anyone before. It's possible that he just wasn't looking – but he's looking with Eduardo. It's hard not to notice, what with the way Eduardo's face flickers and sways with the flux of his thoughts, when he's listening to someone speak, when he's looking studiously, sincerely into their eyes. Add that to the list of Eduardo habits that should make Mark deeply uncomfortable by all precedents, but for some unknown reason are not.

Eduardo wears his heart on his sleeve, and Mark thinks it's remarkable how different that is from him. He doesn't have the schema to be anything like the way Eduardo is, vocal and emotional and unafraid in some ways, though Mark suspects that might be something of a defense mechanism. Mark is brazen, but there's a difference. He wears things heavy in the base of his skull when they're going wrong, a constant headache, showing nothing more than pinched eyebrows and the taut set of his shoulders. His sleeves stay clear. He keeps his heart out of sight and out of mind.

It's kind of ridiculous, Mark thinks. This is the most thought he's put into anything to do with relationships since he made Facebook.

He gets Chipotle with Chris and Dustin after his coding tear is over but before he gets any sleep, two nights later, and he's zoning out when he hears Eduardo's name.

"What?" he says, sliding back into focus.

Chris and Dustin glance at each other. Dustin is grinning.

"We were just saying that, uh, that looks like it's going well," he says.

"What?"

"With Eduardo."

Mark's still not getting it.

"Your _friendship_ ," Dustin says, pronouncing it carefully, as though Mark won't recognize the word.

"Oh." Mark takes a bite of the guacamole section of his burrito. "Yeah."

Chris is smiling tentatively.

"It's good to see you with someone," he says. Dustin chokes on his drink.

"We're not _dating_ ," Mark says. Dustin coughs and Mark gives him a stern look.

"It's not like I can't find the middle ground between having no friends and being, like, married," he says, and then he wonders if that's true. Well, not the marriage part, exactly, but there's something to it.

"You guys have just been spending a lot of time together," Chris says, glancing at Dustin. It's precisely what Mark's brain was trying and failing to arrive at. He shrugs.

"He's a good guy," he said. "He figured out how to use my coffee maker."

Chris raises an eyebrow, and Dustin says, biting down on a smile, "Well, that explains it."

Mark knows what they want to ask – what's Eduardo got that literally no other person ever has, where Mark and stable friendships with people who aren't his roommates are concerned? But he's not sure he knows the answer to that yet, or at least he's not sure he could articulate it in a way that doesn't make him look like a lunatic.

He steals one of Dustin's chips and keeps quiet. Scrutiny worries him a little – he'd rather avoid it for the time being if he can. It's better, he thinks, not to mess with a good thing.

***

Mark passes out in a haze of Chipotle and sleep deprivation and wakes up on time for work the next day. His first groggy instinct is to reach for his phone and scroll to Eduardo's name. It's just – it's been a while since they were in touch, if a while is less than two days.

Still, he texts him, _free tonight?_

The response is a quick _def, i'll provide the booze_. Mark supposes Eduardo must be getting ready for work too, though he doesn't really know what investors get up to when they're not at Facebook.

Mark shoots the shit with Chris and Dustin that day in the bullpen, giving them the starting point of Mark's place and Eduardo and the novel idea of "drinking" and watching them run wild. It is eventually declared that tequila shall be required, and Mark texts Eduardo accordingly.

He takes a nap when he gets home – he's got some kind of feeling about tonight, even if it's just going to be the four of them. He wakes up with the Black Eyed Peas song stuck in his head.

Eduardo's on his doorstep at eight sharp, holding a fifth of Sauza in a black plastic bag, two limes and a salt grinder. He smiles. He looks genuinely just pleased to see Mark. Mark steps back to let him in and gives him a sort of slap between the shoulders in greeting, which he immediately feels kind of weird about after as he shuts the door and follows Eduardo into the living room. Mark does not do physical.

"I brought my own sweatpants this time," Eduardo says, nudging the bag on his shoulder with his hip.

"War- _do_!" Dustin calls as they round the corner. He's already got a beer in hand, sprawled out in Mark's armchair.

Chris pokes his head out of the kitchen, waving. Eduardo waves back and, grinning, he lays his supplies out on the coffee table in front of Dustin, who fist-pumps his approval.

"Excellent," he says. Eduardo sits down heavily on the couch and Mark joins him, after a moment's survey of the room. Chris comes in, carrying shot glasses and a cutting board and knife for the limes, pulls up the ottoman and begins to slice. As soon as he's done, Dustin reaches out to grab his wrist and lick the back of his hand with a slurping noise. Eduardo laughs as Chris snatches his hand back, pulling a face.

Dustin picks up the salt shaker and a lime slice and brandishes them at Chris.

"What shall we toast to first?"

By 11 p.m., they are, at the very least, far deeper into the tequila than anyone should be so early in a given evening. They're listening to a remix of something unidentifiable, and Chris and Dustin are arguing loudly about what could possibly be wrong with the PS3. Dustin keeps proclaiming that he misses the days of DDR and Final Fantasy X and Chris has to stop trying to fix the PlayStation so that he can curl up on the floor and laugh until he cries.

Mark and Eduardo are still on the couch, though they've sunk progressively lower against the cushions. Mark is still sucking on his most recent lime slice. Eduardo looks at him and grins, flushed, and Mark grins back to reveal a wedge of green rind.

Eduardo licks some excess salt off the back of his hand and sighs loudly, throwing his arms over the back of the couch, brushing Mark's shoulder.

"You have no idea how good it feels to act like I'm still in school," he says.

Mark pops the lime out of his mouth and licks his lips. "What would you usually do?" he asks.

"I dunno." Eduardo takes a swig of his beer. "Bars," he says. "Bars that aren't sweaty. Dinner with _colleagues_." He puts a sarcastic affectation on the word and gestures to Mark with his beer in what Mark assumes is a concession of the fact that Eduardo had already subjected him to such a thing.

"That's probably what I should be doing," Mark watches Dustin and Chris half-wrestle drunkenly in front of the TV.

Eduardo's eyes are crinkled at the corners. He laughs to himself.

"Old habits die hard," he says. He's looking at Mark again.

"What," Mark says. He picks up another lime wedge and bites into it for something to do.

"Nothing." Eduardo looks at the ceiling, still smiling. He curls his hand around the back of Mark's neck and squeezes lightly before letting go.

Mark purses his lips around the lime. The tequila is making him feel hot. Beer before liquor, never been sicker; liquor before beer, in the clear. That saying contains nothing about mixing the two, though, and nothing about the adverse effects of Eduardo's friendly, drunk presence beside him either. He gets up, thinking of getting something with ice in it.

The kitchen is dark, and he stands at the sink for a moment, feeling his center of gravity sway.

When he opens the freezer, he can see by its light that Eduardo is standing in the doorway.

"You okay?" Eduardo says, tapping his beer on his thigh in time to the music still emanating from the living room, mixed with the sound of Chris and Dustin's shenanigans.

"Yeah," Mark says. The cold feels good on his face. He is so drunk.

He pulls out the ice tray and drops it on the counter. The ice cubes jump, and he picks one up.

"Sometimes, I just—" he closes the freezer door and leans against the fridge, turning the ice cube over between his fingers, watching it melt. "I just wonder what's next," he says. He feels as surprised to be saying it as Eduardo looks to be hearing it. "You know, I just put everything into Facebook, and now it's like…" He frowns, and tosses the half-melted ice in the sink, wiping his wet hands on his jeans. "It's like, what now?"

"You're only 23," Eduardo says softly.

"But it's never going to be over." Mark's having trouble articulating himself. "I mean, I don't want it to be over. I'm going to be making it for the rest of my life."

He finds a glass and fills it halfway with ice, then starts rummaging for orange juice in the fridge. He can feel Eduardo's eyes on him and he wonders how he's going to finish this confession.

"It's just the only thing I have," he says finally, when he's got the orange juice in one hand and his glass in the other. He stands in the low dark of the kitchen and looks right at Eduardo, facing him. "And – and I'm still drinking tequila in my living room with my college roommates."

"It's not the only thing."

"I just want to know what the next step is," Mark says, hearing the frustration in his voice through the slight slur of the words. He shakes his glass so the ice cubes settle, and then he blinks at Eduardo.

"What'd you say?"

"I said it's not the only thing you have."

Mark feels a slightly incredulous smile dawn on his face.

"Are you talking about you?"

Eduardo grins, and Mark can see him flush a little. "I don't know," he says, taking a swig of his beer. "Maybe."

Mark snorts. "You're drunk," he says, brushing by Eduardo and heading back toward the living room with his ingredients.

" _You're_ drunk," Eduardo says, stepping flush beside Mark and bumping his hip with his own.

"Good one," Mark says. Chris and Dustin seem to have given up on the PS3 and have begun playing what Mark recognizes after five seconds as the drunkest game of Left 4 Dead 2 he's has ever witnessed. He sits down on the couch and starts pouring tequila into his glass.

Eduardo sits next to him, one arm slung in the general direction of Mark's shoulders.

"Hey," he says suddenly, schooling his features into a bold attempt at sincerity that he nearly ruins with the quivering of his lip, "que será, sera, yeah?"

Mark shakes his head. Eduardo gets very Portuguese-y when he's drunk.

"What will be, will be," Eduardo says, grinning. "Like in Spanish, too. Like the song."

Mark shrugs, and Eduardo actually ruffles his hair, affectionate and careless.

"Good talk," he says, looking back to Chris and Dustin getting totally owned by zombies on the TV, and Mark's glad he has a drink now, because he isn't sure what would be liable to come out of his mouth next if it wasn't occupied.

***

It's immediately clear when Mark wakes up in the morning that Eduardo never made it into his sweatpants – or into the guest bed, because he's curled up on the couch, his long legs folded awkwardly, and Mark is on the couch too. Eduardo's got his head tucked against Mark's side, above his hip. Mark is sprawled so low he's almost on the floor, but his arm is draped over Eduardo. They're not tangled together. It's more deliberate than that, which is what makes Mark notice it in a way that's not just hungover and residual.

He closes his eyes again for a moment and then opens them, blinking against the light of the room with its half-closed shades. He wishes it was Saturday morning, not Friday, but he knows it's early, because he doesn't feel shitty enough. He might still be a little drunk. This means his hangover will hit him right around the time he gets to the office, which is fucking great.

He wants to stay here and, like, make eggs with Wardo and Chris and Dustin or something. He wants to go back to sleep right where he is.

He rubs his unencumbered hand over his face and looks down at Eduardo with his wide-open mouth and his absurd hair. There's a patch of skin visible where his shirt has ridden up, and it's right beneath the hand of the arm Mark has curved around Eduardo's side. He brushes his fingers over it, absently, watching them move.

Eduardo stirs and Mark lifts his hand away automatically, wedging it between the cushion and the back of the couch, but all that happens is Eduardo shifts beside him, reaching a hand over and laying it against his hip. Mark thinks he must still be sleeping. He doesn't know how to move in order to find Chris and Dustin or take a shower or brush the post-tequila foulness off his teeth. Eduardo's got him locked down with the palm of one hand and the top of his head nudging into Mark's ribs.

The couch is big enough that they didn't have to sleep this close. And there's an armchair. Mark tries to remember falling asleep, but it comes up blank.

The light is low and clear in the windows with the early threads of morning, and because Mark is still sitting paralyzed on the couch he reaches for last night in his mind again, trying to give himself context, for lack of anything else to do.

And he gets – he gets Wardo standing in the kitchen door in the dark, smiling, tapping his beer against his leg, saying, "It's not the only thing you have."

Mark looks down again. He doesn't understand anything that's happening – how this person came into his life so swiftly and succinctly and failed to leave. And he's never thought of someone as being so _nice_ before, and, like, caring, and…there's something he can't place about Eduardo, like that he's impressed by him. But Mark isn't impressed by anyone, unless it's Sean Parker or something, and that's different.

And God, he never thinks like this. It's so weird. Eduardo is still asleep against his hip, snoring lightly, and Mark can feel the warmth off him, comfortable, like he'd rather always have it instead of not.

Eduardo stirs for real now, which is probably a good thing. Mark was starting to feel as though his train of thought was getting out of control there – tumbling in some unfamiliar direction, a free-fall.

Eduardo sits up slowly, running a hand through his hair and blinking heavily. He squints at Mark.

"Oh," he says slowly, "oh."

"Hi," Mark says.

Eduardo gives a kind of disgruntled _mmph_ in response, stretching with those outrageously long limbs of his before slumping back against the couch, head tipped back. Mark finds himself looking at the arch of his neck, and he blinks out of it.

"I'm gonna go find Chris and Dustin," he says, standing.

"It's Friday, isn't it?" Eduardo says to the ceiling.

"Yeah."

"Awesome."

"Yeah."

It transpires that Chris is in the guest bed and Dustin is actually in Mark's bed. ("What? You obviously weren't going to use it.") Nobody is happy to be awake, but matters are made slightly better by a hangover-absorbing stop at McDonald's on the way to dropping off Eduardo, who says he has to change for work, at his townhouse.

He waves sleepily at them from the curb as they pull away. Mark is driving, and from the passenger seat, Chris says, "What is it an investor does all day, exactly?"

"If he told you that, he'd have to kill you," Dustin says around a mouthful of hashbrowns.

Mark doesn't speak, but as he turns off of Eduardo's street, he mentally resolves to find out the real answer. He feels a little bit like things are lopsided after last night – like Eduardo knows so much more about him than anyone ever has, and he knows hardly anything in return.

He wants to be able to give Eduardo some drunken piece of wisdom like _que será, será_ , and he wants it to be relevant – to stick.

***

The four of them have brunch on Saturday – only the combination of Eduardo's classy social skills, Chris' persuasiveness and Dustin's exuberance for French toast could make Mark do _brunch_ – and Chris, bless him, spares Mark the trouble of showing interest.

"I'm a venture capitalist," Eduardo says. "It means I find promising start-ups and invest in them."

"You can spend all day doing that?" Dustin asks.

Eduardo laughs. "Somehow."

"But we're not a start-up anymore," Mark says. Chris glances at him. "I mean, I know after Thiel we left room for new investors, but isn't the point of being a VC to collect on the company's growth before it gets big?"

He looks at Eduardo with academic curiosity.

"Thiel, yeah," Eduardo says. "Well, my father knew some of the ones who came after him. It was his idea, actually. So that's how I got in."

Mark nods. He's come to think of Eduardo's father as a bit of a dirty word, just from the way Eduardo's face flickers a little every time he mentions him.

"But I don't regret it," Eduardo says quickly. "You know that. I wanted – I'm glad I was able to meet you." He nods to the table. "You guys," he amends, smiling a little, glancing at Mark and then looking down.

Mark avoids everyone's eyes, and avoids thinking about the way his stomach had given a little leap at Eduardo's words. It doesn't stop Dustin from making a dramatic toast with his mimosa, though – about how three's a crowd but four's a party, and how they wouldn't trade Eduardo in if he paid them, which he's already doing, so it's a moot point anyway.

Mark goes to the bathroom while they're waiting for the check, the dibs on which he has already argued Eduardo for and won, because he's polite like that.

Chris, in his feminine way, comes too.

"I think he really likes you," he says thoughtfully to Mark's reflection while they're both standing at the sinks.

"I appreciate the tone of surprise."

"No, I mean – it's fine. It's good."

Mark shrugs.

"Mark," Chris says, turning to him, "you know, it really is good. Making friends. Having – relationships with people who aren't actually a website you made up in college."

Mark fixes him with a challenging stare.

"I have you and Dustin."

Chris snorts. "Okay, and relationships with people with whom you didn't make up the aforementioned website in college."

Mark dries his hands. After a moment he says, "On Thursday, I was talking to Eduardo about how sometimes I wonder what the next step is for me." He frowns. "Like, I don't know, in life. Because Facebook's so much of it." He gives Chris a rueful look.

"And what did Eduardo say?" Chris asks.

"He said it wasn't the only thing I had."

Chris grins. "Does that mean what—"

"Yeah. I think it did."

Chris shakes his head and claps Mark on the back as Mark pushes open the bathroom door in front of him. "I like this one," he declares, and Mark just rolls his eyes.

"Eduardo got the check while you two were having boy talk or whatever," Dustin tells Mark as they sit down.

"Wardo," Mark says reproachfully. Eduardo shrugs in a _sorry I'm not sorry_ kind of way, and Mark's glad he doesn't catch Chris staring at him with such hearts in his eyes that Mark feels a little embarrassed for everyone involved.

Dustin notices, though, and Mark hears him ask Chris about it as they leave the restaurant.

"Later," Chris mutters. Mark throws him a look over his shoulder.

 _What?_ Chris mouths at him. _He's a catch._ He jerks a thumb in the direction of Eduardo's back.

Mark shakes his head. _Unbelievable_ , he thinks, as Dustin cracks up behind him.

***

It's been more than a month before Mark thinks to friend Eduardo on Facebook. It's funny – he doesn't often think about whether someone does or doesn't have an account, because everybody does these days, and because there are so many people on the site now that individual accounts have kind of become abstractions to him.

The most ridiculous thing, though, is that he chickens out when it actually comes time to do it.

He texts Eduardo to ask him first, even though he already knows the answer – _are you on fb?_

He gets back, in quick succession:

_yeah_

_lol of course_

He feels kind of relieved for some reason, even though he's already staring at Eduardo's public profile and clearly it's not like he of all people had to ask. After a little while, he hits "friend," and by that evening Eduardo's accepted the request.

And this thing Mark built? It would be nothing if not handy right about now.

But Eduardo's page is pretty spartan. Mark learns what he can. He identifies Eduardo's father in his lone profile picture – Eduardo standing beneath the weight of his arm, both of them dressed in suits, at some kind of dinner, it looks like. Eduardo looks a little younger here than he is now, but still old for his age.

He has 256 friends. Mark is over the 400 line lately. Very few of those people are actually _friends_ , of course – coworkers, his sisters, cousins. Dustin, Chris. And now Eduardo.

He scrolls through the list of names. Dustin and Chris, and randomly a kid he knew from Phillips Exeter who went to Dartmouth, are the only friends they have in common.

He gets a notification as he sits there contemplating the page. Dustin has "liked" Mark and Eduardo's new friendship. A few seconds later there's a comment, also from Dustin: _lol_

Another from Chris, almost immediately: _fb official!_

Mark sighs. They're probably together. He texts them both, _omg mom stop embarrassing me_ and goes back to trawling Eduardo's profile. His interests section is blank. Work and education: an internship at Lehman Brothers, his current job, Dartmouth, no high school. And in the personal info section, Mark gets a tiny shock: _Interested in: Men_.

He frowns at it for a long moment.

 _Well,_ he thinks finally, chewing on his lip, _isn't that what it's for?_

Not to mention, it goes a long way toward explaining Chris and Dustin's behavior.

***

Eduardo looks tired the next time Mark sees him, which is on Mark's front step for no real reason except he asked if he could stop by and Mark said yes. His eyes are dark and rounded into bleary shadows. Mark tries not to let the fact that he knows Wardo's gay now float to the fore of his mind. Chris is gay. It's whatever. He steps back to let him in.

In the kitchen, he watches Eduardo fish around in the fridge for beers. Eduardo has been here enough times now that it doesn't even sit wrong with Mark when he makes himself at home, and Eduardo, for his part, doesn't give Mark those little glances like he's asking permission, not anymore. They can just do this now. It's not a thing.

"What's up," Mark asks, when he's leaning securely against the counter. He accepts beer and bottle opener when Eduardo hands them over.

"Nothing," Eduardo says in that way of his that means it is precisely not nothing. "I've just got to go to Miami for a few days."

"Oh." Mark waits.

"It's my father," Eduardo says predictably, after a brooding pause and a long pull on his beer. "Wants to introduce me to some new people, he says. New opportunities," and he sighs on the words.

Then he looks at Mark, which is the part Mark had not been looking forward to. He doesn't know what Eduardo wants him to say. He wishes he'd just keep talking. Mark can do listening – he can stand in a room with someone and be quiet and nod occasionally and let them read _supportive_ into that however they want.

Supportive with words, though, that he's not so sure about.

He opts for a half-frown, an expectant sort of sympathy that says he'll take more information if Eduardo wants to give it.

Eduardo still looks miserable, though, and he doesn't say anything, so Mark says, hesitantly, "Want to go sit down?"

"Yeah." He sounds grateful. Mark leads the way.

When they're on the couch, Mark puts his feet up on the coffee table and drinks while Eduardo starts to talk.

"Things are just never good enough for him, you know? I'm doing fine in Palo Alto. Good, even. But it's always got to be the next thing, and the next, and the next." He tips his head back and runs the heels of his hands over his eyes.

"It's just a few days," Mark says. He knows it is not the right thing to say.

Eduardo glances at him sideways, frowning. "I know," he says, sounding distant. "It's never going to stop, though."

"I find that hard to believe."

Eduardo raises an eyebrow.

"One day you'll be more successful than him," Mark says, shrugging. "You'll be better than him. I mean, you already are." He mouths at the lip of his beer. Eduardo turns his head to stare. "You're only 24. At your rate – give yourself a couple years."

"Easy for you to say," Eduardo says, but he's smiling.

"Yeah, well, I'm not trying to live up to anyone," Mark says.

"Sure you are," Eduardo says. Mark looks at him, nonplussed. "With Facebook. That was your thing. You made yourself on that."

Mark shakes his head. He's not getting it.

"It proved that you—" Eduardo starts, and then he stops, shakes his head too, takes a drink of his beer. "I don't know. I wasn't there."

"I wanted to be in a final club." Mark's talking before he realized that he opened his mouth. "I came to Harvard because it was Harvard…and then I still had to work for it."

Eduardo's eyes have slid into a lock on Mark's face. Mark looks over at him for just a moment and something about that expression makes his chest hurt, weirdly. He's never talked about this with anyone before. He didn't even know there was anything _to_ talk about.

He's forgotten what he was going to say. He wonders if Eduardo's father knows he's gay. Is the Saverins' money the kind where Eduardo's got to produce an heir? That would be so stupid. He thinks they're probably new money, but maybe it doesn't matter when it comes to that kind of thing.

He doesn't want Eduardo to have to do anything he doesn't want to do.

"When are you going to Miami?" Mark says finally, and his voice comes out small. He drinks to cover it.

"Thursday," Eduardo says.

It's Tuesday. Mark considers this.

"Want to get drunk?"

Eduardo grins. "Yeah."

"Should I call Chris and Dustin?"

Eduardo shrugs.

"No, then," Mark says, and Eduardo gives a secret little smile. Mark isn't sure why he feels so warm. He goes to re-up on beer, and the feeling dissipates only slightly in the cool wash of the fridge, but by then he kind of likes it.

Eduardo downs the rest of his first beer and accepts a new one when Mark returns. He looks like he's wavering on that thin edge between deep, shuddering unhappiness and wanting to be drunk quickly so he doesn't think about it.

He talks about his father a bit more, though, halting and bitter. Mark thinks this is probably a bad idea, but he doesn't try and stop him.

"Do you hate him?" Mark asks when Eduardo trails off.

"No," Eduardo says automatically, dismissive, and then he blinks, looking kind of taken aback. "I don't know. No." He looks at Mark, frowning, but Mark thinks it's less like he's angry at the presumption and more like he's nervous about the question. "No one's ever asked me," he says quietly.

Mark doesn't say anything. He's toeing a line somewhere in this, only he's not sure quite where it's drawn. He's always crossing lines. He doesn't want to fuck anything up, not here.

"It doesn't matter what he thinks," Mark says finally, when Eduardo's gaze has made the air between them thick.

"You don't know," Eduardo mutters darkly. He slugs back about half of his beer in one go.

"I think I get it," Mark says, shrugging.

Eduardo looks at him for a moment with a thoughtful half-smile on his face, like he's sizing Mark up. Then he says, "I think it's since I came out to him that he's been the worst."

Mark drinks. He doesn't know what to say. Eduardo seems content to keep talking, though. It sounds like he's been carrying this for a long time.

"It's like he's punishing me," Eduardo says, and his voice is flat and low. "Like, you will never really be able to prove yourself to me now, filho, because you're gay." He laughs humorlessly. "I don't know when the last time he called me filho was, though."

Mark really doesn't know what to say. It's so incredibly unfair that anyone would be like this with Eduardo of all people – Eduardo, who is so genuine.

He's surprised all of a sudden to feel the hard set of his own features, the knit of his eyebrows and the downward cant of his mouth. He hadn't realized that any of that internal monologue was slipping onto his face.

Eduardo's looking at him again in that grateful way that makes Mark feel like he's getting something for nothing.

Mark bites his lip, and Eduardo sighs and pulls his knees up onto the couch, cross-legged. "Thanks for listening," he says softly.

"Any time," Mark says, and he means it.

They turn on Rocky after that and try to play a drinking game, but they keep forgetting the rules. As the coffee table becomes more and more cluttered with empties, drinking whenever Stallone throws a punch and whenever he says "yo" kind of just becomes drinking as often as possible.

Eduardo is pretty clearly falling asleep, though, and just as Mark starts itching to go and get his computer, Eduardo yawns and sighs and stretches his legs out across Mark's lap.

Mark looks at him kind of sharply, and Eduardo holds his gaze. His face flushed with alcohol and his eyes are still kind of wobbly, but the eye contact is penetrating all the same. It's like he's asking if it's okay, or – Mark isn't sure if Eduardo's testing or seeking permission or just being drunk and weird or what. He holds absolutely still.

Eventually Eduardo seems satisfied and he looks away, back at the movie, blinking heavily and settling in. Mark's having serious laptop withdrawal, but the weight of Eduardo's calves is anchoring, not to mention kind of comfortable, in that way that drunk people like to put their arms around each other, to touch. Mark has never really thought about that before. Chris and Dustin are tactile enough, but it's between the two of them. They know better than to try with Mark, which means that Mark has never really gotten to decide how much he hates it.

But the answer to that actually seems to be – well, less than expected, at least. Maybe it's just Eduardo. For some reason, Eduardo seems more able to get away with things like this than other people are for Mark. Mark isn't really sure how that was allowed to happen, but he tells himself that it's too late to fix it now.

So he sits there with Eduardo's legs in his lap, stiff but relaxing slowly, as the sound of Eduardo's breathing calms into a slow, soft rhythm.

The credits are rolling when Eduardo says sleepily, all of a sudden, "You should come to Miami." He yawns. His eyes are closed. "Or Saõ Paulo."

Mark is looking over at him, but he doesn't say anything else. It looks like he's fallen back asleep.

Mark leans his head back and lets out a breath, a bit shaky. He considers briefly and decides against lifting Eduardo's legs off of himself and going to bed. Sleep isn't overeager to come, though, and his eyes flicker behind their lids as he breathes shallowly, in and out, in and out. He feels heavy. He tries to let that become tiredness, tries to let the sound of Eduardo next to him lull him into that same state, but every time he focuses on Eduardo he feels more awake.

When he wakes up in the morning, he remembers that he lost count of how many times the DVD menu repeated itself at 28, so he thinks that must have been around the time he fell asleep. His body is aching slightly and his legs are interlocked with Eduardo's on the couch like the teeth of a zipper, haphazard and folded tight.

They both start into consciousness at the sound of a truck clattering over a pothole in the street outside, inhaling sharply and sitting up simultaneously. They're half-woven together and they look at each other for a long moment when their eyes are open and their heads are off their respective couch arms, and then Mark disentangles himself deliberately and stands, stretches, makes a grunting assent at morning.

Eduardo lets his head thunk back down, and he rubs a hand over his eyes. They don't say anything. Mark chalks it up to psychosomatic hangovers but he knows it's really not that at all – it's the prospect of what Eduardo's facing tomorrow, and it's what they talked about last night, and it might a little bit be the way they slept.

Only somehow that's more complicated than either of the other two things, and Mark doesn't think he has the energy to deal with it right now. He makes coffee for two and thinks that he'll probably code the entire time Eduardo is away.

He decides against mentioning what Eduardo said last night while he was half-asleep, about Mark coming to Miami. It feels like this time it's something Eduardo has to do on his own, and anyway, Mark doesn't know what he would say to Eduardo's father. He can't come up with anything very constructive or polite.

***

So Eduardo goes to Miami, which is fine, and Mark spends four days coding, which is also fine. It is. He ignores Dustin and Chris' initial snickering about pining and withdrawal symptoms and absence making the heart grow fonder and pretty soon they stop.

There's a party at someone's house on Friday night, the day after Eduardo leaves – one of those awkward twenty-something attempts at a blowout that really just makes them all painfully aware of how they're not in college anymore. Mark fiddles with a solo cup full of some sort of delicious, deadly alcoholic punch, sweet and sharp in the corners of his mouth. He listens to Chris and Dustin talk about baseball and summer road trips. It's the thick of June now, and the house is loud with the prospect of warm night air in the yard, t-shirts, shorts.

He's aware of, and considering with half his mind as he stands there leaning against the TV cabinet, the fact that his left side feels empty, too light, lopsided. He's missing the gentle weight of another arm just barely pressed against his, a palm flat between his shoulderblades or brushing against the inward curve of his spine, mooring him, pushing softly in new directions. He hadn't really noticed how Eduardo always did that until it was gone.

Someone who Mark thinks might work in HR at Facebook passes on the message that some people are smoking in the back yard, and after a moment of staring at each other and shrugging, Chris, Dustin and Mark troop out there to join in. Mark kind of really likes smoking weed, though he doesn't do it often – he's busy, and drinking is lower maintenance anyway.

A little while later, once he's really feeling it, he leans back in the tall grass, nestling in. He tries to balance his solo cup on the flat of his chest. Chris is deep into some sort of highly philosophical political rant and Dustin is nodding dully, his eyes fixed and a half-grin tenuous on his mouth, and Mark zones out. The night heat presses heavy on his skin, but not heavy enough – he wants it to weigh against him, to make him warm and close. He's slightly sticky with humidity and he thinks how much worse it must be in Miami.

He wishes Eduardo was here. He's feeling kind of handsy, like he wants to touch. He thinks Eduardo might like to take advantage of that while Mark will tolerate it, to do what Mark imagines to be Eduardo's usual level of contact, with other people – maybe an arm around Mark's shoulders, something murmured in his ear with his head bent close.

His solo cup is wetting a ring of condensation into the front of his shirt. He feels like it will never stop being summer. He thinks of really silly things, him and Chris and Wardo and Dustin lying on a playground carousel, heads in the center, legs stretched out radially in four spinning points. It makes him laugh out loud it's so ridiculous.

"What?" Chris asks, and him and Dustin both kind of half-chuckle, that stifled, disjointed high laugh that's the prelude to serious prolonged guffawing.

"Nothing," Mark says, his grin rising and falling on his face, unable to keep up as he floats in and out of his thoughts. It's too many things to do at once, lie here and be drunk and high and think about Eduardo and grin and laugh and talk.

He sighs and pushes his shoulders into the grass, staring at the stars dusted hazy across the purple Palo Alto sky.

He is glad he can be happy. There had been a while there – a few years – when things had been tough. When there had been a lawsuit, and frustration and everything had been happening so fast that he hadn't had time to catch his breath, to close his eyes for one second, to think about how to really live. He kind of feels like Facebook suspended his growing up. He doesn't know if he's an adult now, but he's not a teenager and he's not a student. He's seen things. He's done things – huge, insane things, and he's still doing them.

But now, for just one moment, he's letting himself think about how lovely it is to lie in the grass in someone's back yard in California in June, comfortably cross-faded, thinking about friends and accomplishments and being 23.

He thinks a bit about Facebook, then, too, draws that constant part of his brain to the forefront. He loves it probably more than he loves anything else. He's enormously proud of it, like Eduardo told him he should be once, and of himself – and for other things, for being able to be at a decently good party with decently cool, successful, interesting people who all think that he is interesting, that he is successful, that he is cool. And the best part is that he doesn't even have to do anything with that. He can just lie in the grass and allow himself to smile.

He thinks that he cannot wait to tell Eduardo about these revelations. It makes him laugh, and then Chris and Dustin laugh, and then everyone's laughing for a long time.

***

Eduardo is tired and vaguely unhappy and very, very busy, though, when he gets back from Florida. Mark is feeling good, for his part. He was slightly self-conscious at the recollection of his Big Life Thoughts when he woke up the morning after, but he decided in the end, with a determined set of his jaw, that just because the thoughts were stoned and outrageous didn’t make them less true. He thought of what Erica Albright said to him, way, way back at the beginning, about trite things. It's actually too funny. If only she could see the context in which he's taking her advice now.

He isn't really planning to tell Eduardo much of anything now, but he's thinking of it as an attitude adjustment, or maybe just an attitude realization. He wants to go for pizza on Tuesday the week Eduardo gets back, maybe bring Chris and Dustin, whatever, just hang out. Things don't need to be significant anymore. Things just go on.

But the text he gets back from Eduardo is thick with exhaustion, even through the phone. It's kind of jarring to read.

_hey sorry ton of stuff to do right now since miami i'll let you know_

Mark chews on his lower lip for a long moment as he reads it over, and then he closes his phone with a definitive snap and decides not to worry. Eduardo's got his shit to deal with. Mark gets that. Mark has things to do, too, anyway.

A few minutes later, on second thought, he sends Edaurdo a text back: _sure talk to you later_

It still feels weird, though, kind of tense, a wire pulled taut. Mark tries not to think about it. They eat pizza without him anyway, and Dustin brings this guy from work that he's trying to start a kickball league with because he's going through a phase where he likes things that stupid Brooklyn hipsters do, or the Dustin ones of those things, anyway, kickball leagues and pie bakeoffs.

In any case, it means that the fourth seat at the table in the pizza place is occupied, which makes Mark feel a little more relaxed.

He doesn't hear from Eduardo again until Friday afternoon. It's become a habit by then to flip his phone open and closed every half hour or so, just in case. Mark wasn't worried, but whatever, he just wanted to keep apprised.

 _free tonight?_ Eduardo's text reads.

_yeah chris and dustin are gonna watch baseball on my tv. come_

_yeah cool_

Eduardo shows up at 6:30, before Chris and Dustin have arrived. He looks careworn and tired, but he gives Mark a smile as Mark lets him in.

"How was Miami?" Mark asks, retrieving beers, the standard routine.

"Fine," Eduardo says. He closes his eyes for just a moment and gives a tiny, fluid shake of his head. "The usual."

"What you were expecting."

"Yep."

"Mm," Mark says. He doesn't want to go for pity, because he had a great weekend and that wouldn't be fair.

"What about this week?" Mark says.

"Just closing loops," Eduardo sighs into his beer. "Making good on stuff I started in Florida. My father expects me to, like—" but he stops short, huffs a frustrated little noise through his nose. "I just couldn't not do it once I got back." He glances at Mark, a flicker of his eyelashes up and down. "Sorry."

"No," Mark says dismissively, brushing it off. What a ridiculous thing to apologize for, working. Mark is always doing that to Eduardo – the working part, not so much the apologizing part.

Eduardo asks how Mark's weekend was once they're in the living room and Mark shrugs and says something noncommittal. He gets the sense that Eduardo might always be like this on either end of any dealings with his father. He hopes it'll pass. He doesn't really know how to handle it well, and it's unfamiliar and uncomfortable and vaguely upsetting to see Eduardo so down.

"Who's playing tonight?" Eduardo asks, looking at the blank TV screen.

"Sox and Yankees," Mark says.

"Exciting," Eduardo says tonelessly. Mark kind of wants to know if he's a Marlins fan, more out of Bostonian habit than any vested interest, but it seems too banal a question for the look on Eduardo's face at the moment.

"What happened in Miami, Wardo?" Mark says suddenly. He can't take this wordless brooding. He needs real material to work with if he's going to do anything remotely resembling being a good friend – the kinds of things that sit tenuously in him like he read about them in a book but hasn't ever experienced them in real life. Things like...whatever, like this. Being supportive.

But Eduardo looks up at him, a line pinched between his eyebrows. "Nothing," he says. "Really, nothing out of the ordinary." He studies Mark for a moment, eyes flickering around his face, back and forth between his eyes, briefly down to his mouth and then his shoulder and back up.

Finally he sighs and gives a defeated little shrug, and the combination is so helpless that Mark feels it right in his gut.

"I—" Eduardo starts, and then he cuts himself off, struggling, looking genuinely distressed. Mark makes a little movement with no object, an involuntary jerk of his hand in Eduardo's direction that is quickly stifled.

"I'm sick of him controlling my life," Eduardo says finally in a bit of a rush, like he wants to get the words out quickly now he's found them. "I'm an adult, you know? I can handle things."

"Have you told him that?"

Eduardo's laugh is bitter and abortive. "It's not that simple."

"Why not?" Mark doesn't bother to try and keep a challenging note out of his voice. He's in deep enough – he might as well.

He gets eye contact for his trouble, again, long and hard. He has the sense that Eduardo is legitimately considering the question and he forces himself not to look away, even though his heart is pounding uncomfortably in his chest.

"I don't know," Eduardo says finally, like it's the biggest revelation in the world. "You make it sound so fucking easy," he adds, a little petulantly.

"I didn't," Mark says, shrugging. "I'm just saying."

Eduardo nods. A rueful sort of smile twists his mouth, and then, unexpectedly, it blooms into something genuine and heartfelt. It crinkles in the corners of his eyes like Eduardo's smiles always do. He laughs softly, looks down, runs a hand over his forehead.

"I'm sorry," he mutters. "And thank you."

Mark sighs, pursing his lips around a smile. "Sure," he says. It would appear – improbably – that he did something right. With _words_ , no less. It's a goddamn momentous occasion.

Eduardo lays a hand on Mark's shoulder, suddenly, and leaves it there, looking at him, kind of canting his head to make sure he catches Mark's gaze. His palm is warm and solid and it seems to be trying to say a lot of things that neither of them have particularly figured out how to say out loud yet.

It's only when the front door opens and Dustin yells down the hall that he brought the Cracker Jack and that he has dibs on the prize already so don't bother asking, that Mark realizes he's holding his breath. Eduardo pulls his hand away and rubs the back of his neck with it, glancing at Mark and then away again, smiling to himself.

"In here," Mark yells, though he's still looking at Eduardo out of the corner of his eye. He hopes Eduardo doesn't notice. It's just – that look on Eduardo's face, that slightly wistful, hesitantly hopeful, tremulously happy look, Mark's pretty sure he put it there. He's seen how Eduardo carries a weight of halting disappointment, growing up in tethers, never really seeing his life as his own, and he thinks it might be lifting a little, now, simply because Mark is here, because Mark can make Eduardo smile with a few poorly chosen words and a growing acceptance of the touch of Eduardo's hand on his shoulder.

Mark just kind of wants to internalize that fact before it dissipates, so that he can carry it forward wherever they go from here.

***

The next morning, Mark opens his eyes, immediately wide awake, and is presented with the pale slats of light on the ceiling, the knowledge that it's Saturday, and, unexpectedly but undeniably, a kind of shocking clarity filling his mind about one thing: he and Eduardo are not, in the most general sense of the word, normal friends.

It's just – last night he watched Chris and Dustin dicking around, yelling at the baseball game, just like always. Until Eduardo, they had been the only people he thought of as friends, in the sense of "friends" expected of him by the rest of the world.

But last night all he could think of was the way he'd talked to Eduardo, Eduardo's earnest face, the emotive press of Eduardo's hand on his shoulder.

Chris and Dustin are fun. They are open, and they listen and talk, and they want to share and help. They are tactile, affectionate, friendly in the most literal sense of the word. They sit on Mark's couch drinking beer and talking about whatever and just being around.

Eduardo is all of those things, he does all of those things. But Chris and Dustin aren't, they are _not_ like Eduardo. Eduardo, somehow, manages to be all that and still way, way more.

Mark thinks it might be because Eduardo is so much more fragile than anyone he's ever met, and he _feels_ so much more. The tiny armchair psychologist buried somewhere within Mark wants to attribute this to Eduardo's father, his strange, moneyed, culturally unanchored upbringing, the social pressures of Dartmouth and that weird, horrible business world Eduardo inhabits and the fact that he seems to have been saying the whole time they've known each other that he's never had a friend he really liked on his own terms, just for who they were, until he met Mark.

And Mark – Mark has a lot in front of him. He's got the site – the company – and he's got money now, and the growing understanding that he's not just making a name for himself, he's making history. It kind of feels like he always knew that now that it's getting to be real. Facebook was his opus, and he's Mark, so his opus wasn't going to be anything short of what it's turned out to be.

Mark has people, even, the same ones as ever – his family, Chris and Dustin. They were always enough, though enough for Mark isn't much.

So…now he just has Eduardo on top of everything, that's all. He knows, though he doesn't know how or why he knows, that Eduardo is enough for him. And though it's stunning and confusing, he's starting to think that he might be enough for Eduardo too.

He really wants to be enough for Eduardo.

Weird.

So that's just it. It was just so obvious, putting him and Eduardo next to Chris and Dustin after that Miami conversation. Eduardo's hand on Mark's shoulder is different than Chris or Dustin's, and so is having him look intently into Mark's eyes and watching him shuffle around in Mark's kitchen. It's… _more_. It makes Mark thrill a little bit, and makes him insanely scared at the same time, and those are both such foreign feelings that he actually reaches for his laptop without even getting out of bed, opens it and starts to code, blindly, ignoring the slight quiver of his hands, just to take his mind off it all.

He codes for the rest of the day, getting up once to go to the bathroom and get a glass of water. He doesn't even notice he hasn't eaten until about eight p.m., and then he hears Eduardo's voice in his head – _Mark, eat something. No, not tuna fish, I mean real food._

"Tuna fish is real food," he mutters to himself, tongue between his teeth as his typing fingers slow to a halt mid-line.

He pictures Eduardo laughing exasperatedly, imagines him maybe touching Mark gently on the back of the hand, smiling in that way that says, _What am I going to do with you?_

He looks down at his hand, brushes his fingers over his skin hesitantly. He bites his lip.

He ends up making macaroni, though, because he doesn't want Eduardo to be mad.

***

Okay, but the problem with revelations like this is that once Mark has them he can't un-have them. It's not that he minds, with Eduardo. It's just that he sees it _everywhere_ now, the little signs, and they're starting to make him wonder.

It's the light brush of Eduardo's fingertips over his elbow, or how when he laughs sometimes his eyes get so crinkled that they scrunch all the way up and he leans his whole body forward, dipping his shoulders, like if Mark were anyone else he'd rest his head on their chest. It's the way Eduardo looks at him – like he's seeing right through all the bullshit and the guard and the standoffishness and underneath it he's finding this wonderful shining spark of a person, and he's humbled and impressed and bemused and hopeful all at once.

It's the way he smiles, and the way he says, "You amaze me," shaking his head, simple and earnestly affectionate, as though he really wants Mark to get it.

Mark doesn't know what to do with a person who treats him like that. He wants to be able to give it back, wants this to be a two-way thing, because Eduardo deserves that much. But it's hard for him to express a sense of something he doesn't he even have a name for yet. It's hard for him to look back into Eduardo's honest face and say, honestly, "You amaze me too," even if – even though – it's true.

"When I say 'more than friends,' what does that mean to you," Mark asks Chris over lunch at the office one day in late June.

"Dating?" Chris says around a mouthful of salad. "Or, like…similar."

"Mm," Mark says. He picks at the crust of his uneaten sandwich.

"Why?" Chris says, and then – this is what Mark had been afraid of – his face goes undeniably sly and knowing.

"No," he says, incredulous, at the exact same time as Mark says, "Don't."

"No!" Chris says. He puts down his sandwich and lays a hand on the table between them. " _Mark_."

"Jesus, stop."

Chris settles back in his chair, arms folded across his chest. "Why'd you ask that question, then?"

"Because I thought of it the other day -- _not_ in that way – and I wanted to know if it could mean anything else."

"Well, how did you mean it?"

"Just, like…different than usual friends." Mark fiddles with the lining of his hoodie pocket.

"Like a bromance?"

"I don't know," Mark mutters unhappily.

"Like a super special _awesome_ bromance?"

"Sure, fine," Mark says, just to get him to not say anything else like "super special awesome bromance" ever again.

Chris has an eyebrow cocked; Mark can practically hear his gaydar going off. It's like an air raid siren.

"Fine," he says, because if he's being honest with himself he's wanted to know for a long time. "What do you think?"

Chris regards Mark for a long moment, his face gone a little serious, like he's sizing Mark up. Then he says, quite evenly, "I think he's in love with you."

Mark would have choked on his sandwich if he'd been chewing at that moment. As it is, he just sort of coughs spastically in the back of his throat, blinking rapidly. "Excuse me?"

"It may or may not be bromantic love," Chris says genially. "I just mean that it's pretty obvious that he cares a lot about you and that, you know, you make him happy."

"I know that," Mark says blankly. He wants to go back about 15 seconds to a particular word beginning with L.

"And I know he's gay."

"I know," Mark says.

"Well…there you go, then. I guess that's it."

"That's what?"

"Mark, I don't know," Chris says, smiling a little. "You have to figure this out if you want to."

"This has been singularly unhelpful," Mark grouses as Chris stands up to throw his trash away.

"I've got to go back to work," Chris says. "I believe in you, man." He grins.

"Oh, great."

Chris actually winks before he walks away. Sometimes Mark wishes he could just live in some kind of bubble world where he never has to talk to anyone or solve any normal human life problems like this one.

Alright. Chris thinks Eduardo is in love with him. Mark doesn't even know what that means. Can something like that be platonic between a gay guy and a straight guy? Well – to be fair, Mark isn't much of anything these days. Mark's sort of Facebook-sexual. Or no-time-for-sexual.

Mark drops the B of bromance in his mind experimentally. His mouth has gone dry and his pulse is stuttering slightly, the space between his collar and the rise of his neck hot. But it's not unpleasant. He thinks of Eduardo touching him gently, casually, looking into his eyes. He thinks of the way Eduardo will laugh at something he says and then let his face fall softly, that affectionate, very slightly pained look, the press of his lips together as he watches Mark.

Well – whatever. Mark is flustered. This doesn't confirm anything either way, he thinks. And there's nothing he can do about it – he certainly can't take any action about whatever this is. That would violate a strict sort of isolationist policy he's been imposing on himself for a very long time.

He thinks, though, that wants to get drunk with Eduardo again, soon, and see what happens with this sitting in the back of his mind.

"Fuck," he mutters under his breath. He had been thinking for a while that Chris and Dustin knew something he didn't. Now he's wondering if they just knew something he hadn't yet been able to admit to himself.

***

Mark is kind of pleasantly surprised as the week wears on that his talk with Chris doesn't really change anything. He'd expected the next time he saw Eduardo be some kind of awkward at least, maybe slightly tense and over-observant on Mark's part, but in the end it's not. Things are normal between them. Maybe that's kind of telling. He doesn't mention anything to Eduardo, and Eduardo doesn't act any differently.

Of course, Eduardo not acting any differently means him coming over in the middle of a gorgeous Saturday afternoon and making Mark make them Long Islands and sit on the front stoop with him, and it means Eduardo's arm around his shoulders and Eduardo's knee bumping his. Mark catches him staring, once, and the look on his face is…it makes Mark nervous, if nervous is a little swoop in his chest and a strange urge to put his hand on the curve of Eduardo's neck or touch the skinny peak of his ankle where it rests, folded beneath Eduardo's knees, right next to Mark's thigh.

"Summer makes me miss Saõ Paulo," Eduardo sighs.

"Do you remember it?" Mark says. He knows Eduardo moved to Miami when he was pretty young.

"I feel like I do, you know?" Eduardo says. "My family's still there, and I go sometimes. But I feel like I remember being there. Like, living."

"It sounds nice," Mark says. He knows Saõ Paulo is a big city, but he pictures Eduardo laughing on winding little streets, lots of color and noise, tanned kids playing soccer – either that or clubbing, maybe, under neon and premonitory summer heat. It seems like the kind of place he'd fit in either way. Eduardo is in suits most of the time, stiff and serious, but Mark can see the life in him, that noise and that color. It's buttoned up behind his dress shirts, waiting to be let out.

Eduardo's knee bumps his gently.

"I'm glad you're here," Mark says.

Eduardo blinks at him. "What?"

"I'm glad you're here and not in Brazil. Not because I don't want you to get to be in Brazil. But I'm glad you're here."

Eduardo's smile spreads slowly and it definitely, definitely makes Mark's heart skip a little. Oh, Jesus.

"Me too," Eduardo says. He laughs. "I think you're probably the only person who could ever get me to say that I'd rather be in Palo Alto than Brazil."

"That's a good thing?"

Eduardo smiles down at his feet, and he brushes the little finger of the hand that's resting on the front step beside Mark's over the back of Mark's hand, and then he leaves it there, hooked between Mark's fingers.

"That's a good thing," he says, and Mark thinks the most amazing part of this is that he's not pulling his own hand away.

Eduardo has some kind of work function to attend that night, whatever that means for a VC, so he leaves Mark's around six, the slight shine of his eyes and the lazy grin on his face belying a low-level of pregaming that Mark thinks certainly wouldn't be enough for him to get through a benefit or whatever with a lot of investors. He hopes for Eduardo's sake that the booze is free there.

He tells Eduardo to drive safe and watches him walk to the car, feeling a little pang at the way Eduardo looks back just once and gives him a soft smile.

Then Mark turns straight around, leaving their glasses on the front step, picks up his phone and calls Chris.

"Is it inevitable?" he asks as soon as Chris answers.

"What?" Chris says after a pause.

"Me and Wardo," Mark says brusquely, as though if he gets the words out quickly and emotionlessly they won't mean anything.

"I…Mark, what? What's going on?"

"I just want to know if you think that that's going to happen."

Another pause in which Mark paces around the living room. Then Chris says, "It's up to you what happens."

"But do you think it's going to," Mark presses.

"I think I need some more specifics," Chris says, and Mark can hear his grin.

"You are killing me."

"Hang on, I'm putting you on speaker."

"What, wait—"

"Hi, Mark!"

Mark slumps down on the couch. "Hi, Dustin," he mumbles.

"Congrats on your engagement."

Mark just shakes his head.

"Okay, okay." Chris is back. "Like, what's the question. Do I think you two are going to sleep together or something?"

Mark puts a throw pillow over his face and holds his breath. Maybe he can just die peacefully.

"Or date, or…give me something to work with here," Chris says. "I'm not, like, the gay whisperer."

"Though I think that might be the gayest thing you've ever said," Dustin points out.

"Seconded." Mark pulls the pillow away from his face and glares at nothing. "Okay, um. I don't know. Just…" he sighs heavily. "Don't make me do this, Chris. I don't do this."

"Alright." Chris' tone is placating. "I mean, if you want to make something happen, I don't think Wardo's going to put up much of a fight."

"What do I do?" Mark says. His voice comes out much smaller than he had expected. He has never felt so helpless in his entire life.

"Take him out or something."

"Like a date?"

"Yes, Mark, like a date, unless I have misread your intentions," Chris says, deadpan, and Mark has to smile a tiny bit.

"Then what," he says.

Dustin laughs.

"You're on your own from there, man," Chris says.

"We could pick up," Dustin chimes in, "and smoke at your place and then, you know, me and Chris could leave, quietly, and…"

Chris snickers.

"I hate you guys," Mark says.

"Do you hate us in a way where you still want me to pick up?" Chris says.

Mark sighs. "Yes."

"Cool," Chris says. "Tomorrow night!"

"Okay," Mark says weakly.

The line clicks dead over the sounds of Dustin laughing and what Mark could swear was a high five.

He sprawls back across the couch and lets himself think, just for a moment, about what he's getting himself into.

He likes Eduardo. A lot. He cares about him, and he likes the way Eduardo treats him – he likes being with him, and he likes the way Eduardo smiles when Mark is being ridiculous and the warmth of his body when they sit just a little too close and the way the pads of his fingers feel on Mark's skin…

And, okay. There's that.

He tries to imagine what it would be like for Wardo to touch the hinge of his jaw as he steered him against a wall, or—or to kiss him, or—

His heart is pounding and he's hot everywhere. He stands up just to derail his train of thought and goes into the kitchen to get a beer. His hands are shaking slightly. Christ.

So, gay for Eduardo. That's fine. That's not really a surprise, considering that it's _Eduardo_ and honestly, the way he is with Mark, and his ridiculous hair and the long lean lines of his body and…but, okay, no. Mark takes a breath. He has to do this right. Eduardo deserves better than only just lust or whatever that was. He's too important for Mark to do any of this by half.

It's a lot to catch up with at once, all these feelings that have been sitting dormant and unrealized inside him this entire time. But at the same time, there's a little gleam of nervous, hopeful excitement. Mark…Mark could have someone like Eduardo. He's never, ever thought that someone like Eduardo could happen to someone like him.

He stands at the sink and breathes and wavers between joy and panic and confusion and lots of thoughts of Eduardo that have no business being in his head until finally he feels like he's calmed down a little, and then he goes back to the living room and picks up his computer and his phone.

He has a reservation to make.

***

Mark wakes early on Sunday morning and codes over the redesigned profile page just to have something to do with his hands until a more reasonable hour. He shuts his laptop with a snap at 10:30 a.m. before he can change his mind and shuffles into the kitchen to find something edible and to stare completely unproductively at Eduardo's name in his phone contacts.

All Mark has to do is call him and ask him if he wants to have dinner tonight and hear him say yes. It's not like there's any other way this could go – Mark isn't even trying to talk himself into that, it's just a fact. He knows Eduardo is free – they just know each other's schedules now, somehow, without Mark even noticing they've learned them – and it's Wardo, honestly, when does he ever not want to do something with Mark, and especially when their last something ended in the twining of their fingers, the lingering glance back… _anyway_ , Mark thinks firmly, it's not so much that he's worried he'll be rejected as he just doesn't know how to phrase it.

He dithers as he sits on the kitchen counter, kicking his legs and flipping his phone open and closed.

"Hi, Wardo," he thinks, "Chris basically told me this would happen whether I like it or not, so do you want to have dinner with me tonight and it will pretty much be like a date except I have trouble saying that word out loud but I think you may think of everything we do together as kind of a date anyway, so, um, I'll pick you up at seven?"

Right.

He ends up sitting on his stoop again with a cup of coffee that he has only vague intentions of drinking. The view down the front walk is kind of soothing, for some reason. He feels a little more at ease here in the warm air than he did hunching in the artificial light of the kitchen like something caged.

He looks to the spot at his right, touches two fingers gently against the concrete there, and takes a breath. Then he opens his phone and dials.

"Hey, Wardo," he says evenly when Eduardo answers.

"Hey," Eduardo says, and Mark can hear the smile and oh, God, how did he get here and is this really happening and—

"What's up?" Eduardo prompts when Mark has been silently panicking for a little too long.

"Do you want to have dinner with me tonight?" Mark says, just a tiny bit too fast and a touch breathless, but he doesn't care. It's out.

And why does he have to start worrying about rejection _now_?

But it only lasts a second, because of course Eduardo – good old Eduardo – says, "Sure thing," like it's _nothing_ , and Mark wonders if and when he'll get it and if he even needs to get it or if he's already gotten it and this is just how comfortable he is with it, and that's sort of scary but also sort of really wonderful.

"I can pick you up at seven," Mark says.

He hears Eduardo laugh a little before saying, "Sounds good." Mark thinks they'll get to that comedic, clichéd "Wait, is this a _date_?" moment over dinner, probably. He's not sure yet what his response will be.

"How was your thing?" he asks just for something to ask.

"Uneventful," Eduardo says. "The Long Islands helped."

Mark smiles.

"Chris and Dustin wanted to smoke at my place later tonight," he says, suddenly remembering phase two of the plan. It's kind of ridiculous how easily he gets distracted when he talks to Eduardo. Or thinks about talking to Eduardo, or prepares emotionally to talk to Eduardo. "If you wanted…to come home with me after dinner." Well, that's one way to phrase it, he thinks.

"Oh, cool. Yeah," Eduardo says obliviously. "Fair warning, though, I get kind of ridiculous."

"Happens to the best of us." Mark is privately trying to decide whether an absurdly stoned Wardo will be a help or a hindrance in whatever half-formed goals he has for the evening. "So I'll see you at seven?"

"I'll be there," Eduardo says. Mark can still hear his smile, and he spends a good five minutes after he hangs up just staring vaguely around his front yard, repressing a dizzy little smile of his own.

***

Mark would wear real shoes and stuff if it wasn't July now, honestly he would, but he thinks it would look a little too close to too much effort, so he opts not to put any thought into his appearance as per usual. He pulls up to Eduardo's townhouse and tries very hard not to let his heart race as he watches him walk down the front steps.

Eduardo smiles when he gets in the car and says, "Hey, Mark," and Mark knows that if he hasn't been doomed from the start, he's definitely doomed now.

The ride to the restaurant is uneventful, and only when they pull up does that predictable half-incredulous grin start to spread across Eduardo's face.

"What," Mark says defensively, even though he knows precisely what.

"This was where – when we first…" Eduardo says slowly, staring out the car window. He turns slowly to Mark. Mark gets out of the car.

"I was just being lazy about finding somewhere," he mutters when Eduardo gets out too, but then Eduardo is rounding the car to stand right in front of him.

"Mark," he says, and when Mark doesn't look at him he reaches out and turns his face with two fingers at the side of his jaw. Mark's breath hitches a little, tight in his throat, before Eduardo lets his hand drop to catch lightly around Mark's wrist. Mark looks down at it and then back up and Eduardo's face isn't that close to his but it feels _so close._

"This is a date," Eduardo says, soft and clear. And, okay, that question came a tiny bit sooner than Mark had expected. Except it's not a question – it's as though Eduardo already knows precisely what he's walking into, and he just wants to make sure Mark is on the same page.

Mark can only swallow, and keep his eyes locked on Eduardo's, and say so weakly it's almost comical: "Maybe."

He worries his bottom lip between his teeth while Eduardo studies him for a moment longer, hyperaware of how Eduardo's still holding onto him. Eduardo glances down and brushes his thumb over the heel of Mark's palm and the papery inside of his wrist, just once, back and forth.

"Wardo," Mark says. His voice is choked and small and he's torn in anticipation between terror and excitement. He's never noticed how dark Eduardo's eyes are before, how he narrows them just a tiny bit when he looks at someone close up, like he doesn't want to see anything but them.

It's almost a relief when Eduardo lets go of him. But even so, Mark feels himself keen forward just a tiny bit.

"Come on," Eduardo says brightly, ignoring all of this, like it doesn't change anything that their dinner is a surprise date and that Mark is still staring at him with big anxious moony eyes from just inside his personal space.

Eduardo leads the way inside, and once he's caught his breath enough for his legs to function, Mark follows.

They sit, and the waitress beams at them like she thinks they're some sort of adorable couple, which Mark supposes may be moderately true. He orders the Brumont again, because he might as well do this romantic recreation of their first dinner properly, right? And it seems to make Eduardo really, really happy, which is pretty much all Mark is interested in at the moment.

"I still have the cork," he says lightly.

"Which?" Eduardo is eyeing him from across the table.

"From our bottle the last time we were here," Mark says, and he meant it pretty objectively but he knows it makes him sound lovelorn, like he's sixteen and listening to Bright Eyes and swooning over the cork in his room.

Eduardo smiles, though, soft-eyed.

"I'm glad," he says.

They talk through dinner, amiable and casual, and it would almost be as though everything was normal except Eduardo has still got those eyes, all lashes and low-lit intensity, the whole time.

Mark recalls Chris saying that Eduardo was in love with him, and he studies his face and it completely bowls him over that he should get to have this. The best part and the scariest part is that he thinks he understands now why Eduardo wants him at all, and why he's stuck with him this long. He thinks he's coming to grasp it, their give and take and the way they fit into each other's lives like puzzle pieces. It's really, really, really nice. It's sort of perfect.

"I think you're really good for me," he half-blurts during a lull in the conversation.

Eduardo raises an eyebrow.

"You're what I was missing," Mark says, and it feels so, so weird to say this stuff out loud but he feels like he has to get it on the record. He's thinking about his kitchen in the half-dark, orange juice on the counter, Eduardo in the door with a beer telling him that Facebook isn't the only thing he has.

"Yeah," Eduardo says. "I know."

 _Put your hand on the table_ , Mark thinks to himself. _Let him hold your hand._

But he can't do it.

He'll get there, he hopes, eventually. Maybe soon. He hopes – he thinks that they'll have time.

He gets the check and Eduardo rolls his eyes, but then he gives Mark such a patently adoring smile that Mark colors a little, the warmth flushing all the way in through his chest.

Eduardo takes a deep breath when they step outside, his chest expanding and his eyes turned up to the starry summer sky. The night is heady with crickets and the light residual blush of daytime heat. Mark stands beside Eduardo with his hands shoved in his pockets, shoulders tight, waiting uncertainly for the next step.

Finally Eduardo turns to him. His eyes are a little overbright.

"I really want to kiss you," he says.

Mark feels a muscle jump in his jaw as he bites down around whatever response was about to come tumbling out of his mouth, and then he murmurs, tight, "Wardo," because he just feels like he has to say something and Eduardo's name seems like the surest thing he can put into words right now.

"I don't want you to do anything you don't want to do," Eduardo says, fingering the half-done zip of Mark's hoodie against his chest, "but if you want to—"

"I want to," Mark hears himself say, nervous but definite. And honestly, he's 23 and it's just a kiss, the first kiss of what is increasingly looking to be an inevitable many more – so why is his heart hammering almost painfully in his chest as Eduardo puts a hand on his shoulder? But he wants so badly to do this right – Eduardo is looping his arms around his neck now and Mark is just terrified of losing him over something stupid, though he doesn't even know what that would be, but Eduardo leans in and pulls him forward gently and Mark still keeps thinking that he's just so, so afraid to fuck this up, he's never been so scared in his life and it doesn't make sense but Eduardo is so close and his eyes are dropping closed and Mark could count his eyelashes if he wanted to, and then, and then—

Eduardo kisses him, and the world, contrary to expectation, does not end.

Eduardo's lips pressing against Mark's are light but sure, and Mark's heart has already burst into a wonderful, aching relief before his mind catches up with it in stages. His hands rise automatically to Eduardo's shoulderblades first, and then he feels the soft nudge of his nose into his cheek, and then he breathes into it and they're wrapped only lightly together but Mark can still cant his mouth against Eduardo's and let himself white out everything that isn't this, this, this.

It's only a tiny bit the most natural thing in the whole world, and a tiny bit something huge and dramatic like the blinding realization of a truth he never knew. Mostly, though, more than anything, it's just Eduardo, soft lips and his body close and a little murmur of warm breath as he shifts, and it's new and incredible and somehow perfectly familiar all at once.

Mark can feel himself shaking slightly when Eduardo finally pulls back, and he blinks his eyes open immediately, wanting to catch that glimpse of Eduardo's face an inch away. It's a momentary shock when Eduardo's eyes are open too, and they have a second of looking at one another from as close as they could be without touching. It's more intimate by far than the kiss, more intimate than anything Mark's ever had, and he feels it glow soft and heavy all the way down to his bones.

They've fallen into this, he thinks. It's been deliberate but so slow that he hasn't really seen it fully, with his eyes as wide open and unblinking as they'll go, until now. And seeing Eduardo right here in front of him, that hope in his eyes that Mark might want to want him, his little smile so familiar even in a short time that Mark feels like it's part of him, Mark knows, really lets himself know for the first time, that they've been falling in love since they met.

It's as though he's only understood this in pieces, in fits and starts, never as one big, bright, shining thing. It's wonderful to take away all the blinders and filters and excuses and distractions and fill everything up with this one complete thing. He's had this kind of clarity for coding, but never for another person.

He murmurs, "Wardo," and he touches the side of Eduardo's long neck where it dips into his shoulder, and Eduardo leans in and brushes another kiss over Mark's lips and Mark tries to give it back, hoping Eduardo will understand.

Then Eduardo steps back and he smiles and the spell lifts, and Mark is left standing there feeling simply like this is the first moment of something completely new.

For the first time he realizes he's as excited for this as he was so long ago when the site was first exploding, when everything was at his feet and he had every possibility before him. Jesus. It's incredible. It is going to be incredible.

Eduardo's just grinning at him now, and Mark wants to tell him absolutely everything but he doesn't know how to explain it without just kind of kissing Eduardo more, maybe kissing him forever. So he reaches out, and – so what if "eventually" became five minutes? – takes his hand.

"Come on," he says, grinning, and he tugs Eduardo toward the car.

***

Eduardo can't seem to take his eyes off of Mark the whole ride back. Mark's entire body is buzzing. His mind keeps flickering into work like it always does, but he pushes it away. It feels so good to focus only on this, to think to himself, _fuck everything else_ and to want to drive all night with Eduardo and stop outside the city somewhere quiet with no lights.

They pull up outside Mark's house. He can see Dustin's car and he knows Dustin knows where the spare key is hidden, so he and Chris are probably already inside.

He parks and rolls up the windows and turns off the engine and takes off his seatbelt, and then they sit there, all tense, giddy silence. Mark's brain is telling him to get out of the car but his body is refusing to do it. Presumably, it has other plans.

Eduardo unclicks his seatbelt and lets it retract slowly, a little quivering smile playing on his lips.

Mark's looking down at the steering wheel, but he can see Eduardo out of the corner of his eye.

He thinks, a little wildly, that it's as though he's spent his whole life tripping along the surface, skimming shallowly, never submerging in anything beyond himself.

And now Eduardo – and – and right now, Mark just wants more than anything to dive in.

Eduardo turns to him and says, "Mark," and in the space of a breath Mark is leaning over the gearshift and grabbing the front of Eduardo's shirt and kissing him hard. Eduardo's hand pulls him in behind his neck, and Mark has never done this in a car before and it's heinously awkward, all twisted toward each other with the console between them and his knees jammed against the steering wheel, but he doesn't care.

His hands have tangled in Eduardo's hair without him even noticing and this is so, so good, Eduardo pliant beneath his touch and his mouth canting open against Mark's, wine-sweet and soft as Mark licks into it, and _oh_ the little whine he gives when Mark sucks on his lower lip, a little nip with his teeth, Eduardo breathing out sharp against his cheek. He shifts in Mark's hands and kisses from the corner of his mouth up his jaw and then to the soft spot below his earlobe. Mark tips his head to give him access, feels a light scratch of fingernails over the back of his neck and shivers.

He wants to clamber over the gearshift into Eduardo's lap. He doesn't even care anymore. They've been more tangled together than this without making out, even just lying on Mark's couch, and that seems kind of ridiculous.

Mark's hand skims down the side of Eduardo's neck as Eduardo mouths breathily along his jaw, and he slips it inside the warm open space where the top two buttons of Eduardo's shirt are undone. He thumbs at the sharp swell of Eduardo's collarbone and then the spreads his palm against the flat of his chest and Eduardo tips his head into the crook of Mark's shoulder, sucks a kiss into the skin there, lets his breath out harsh and shaky in a half-groan.

Mark kisses a red swath up his neck, the tip of his tongue against the heady taste of Eduardo's skin, cologne and summertime and something darker that's all Wardo-Wardo-Wardo and Mark slots his teeth slack against the column of his throat, tongues around his Adam's apple and feels the quick heartbeat in his chest and it makes his head spin, God, he can't believe this is happening, he _cannot_ believe it.

"Mark," Eduardo mutters. His voice is rough around the edges. He pulls back and looks into Mark's face, and then he kisses him lightly, eyes fluttering closed, swiping his tongue over Mark's lower lip.

"We should go inside," he murmurs against Mark's mouth.

"Why?" Mark says hoarsely.

"Because Chris and Dustin are inside."

"That's precisely why we shouldn't go."

Eduardo laughs.

"It's okay," he says. "I can still kiss you when I'm high. I can kiss you in front of Chris and Dustin."

"Yeah," Mark mutters, glancing at his house, "I don't know if that's exactly going to shock them."

Eduardo talks him into facing the music eventually, though, and they make their way up the walk to the house. Mark feels a little unsteady on his feet. He looks back at his car, sitting there all innocent like it's going to lord this over him forever, and then Eduardo lays his palm against Mark's lower back and steers him gently toward the house. It's so familiar, Eduardo just a little closer at his side than he was four hours ago, like hardly anything has changed. Mark smiles to himself.

The house is dark and quiet when they get inside, and Mark is just fighting a crazy false hope that maybe they're alone after all when he hears laughter from the back yard.

It's dusk, and Chris and Dustin are rocking on the creaky porch swing (Mark's mother forced it on him when he moved in) in the low yellow glow of the porch light when Mark slides the screen door open.

He doesn't even realize how he and Eduardo must look until Chris and Dustin take one glance at them and burst out laughing.

Eduardo runs a hand through his mussed hair, smiling ruefully at his shoes. Mark chews momentarily on his lower lip before it occurs to him that it's probably already bitten-red, and, oh, fuck, there are marks up Eduardo's neck, and Mark touches the spot beneath his own ear and feels the bruise there.

Dustin bursts into song.

"They'll fall in love, and heeeeere's the bottom line," he croons to Chris. "Our trio's down to two!"

Chris is actually crying with laughter. Mark really hopes this means that they've already begun the festivities, because otherwise he's going to be a little offended. He spots Chris' little bubbler to the side of the swing and tries to forgive them for being complete life-ruiners on the grounds that they're high. It doesn't really work.

Mark hears Eduardo give a kind of muffled laugh behind him as Dustin continues, "Ze sweet caress of twilight, there's magic everywhere…"

"Whose side are you on?" he mutters to Eduardo. Eduardo shrugs, grinning.

"Yeah, well, you're definitely the Pumba of this scenario, not the Timon," Mark grouses to Dustin as he pulls up a chair.

Chris collects himself long enough to say, "I didn't know you'd seen the Lion King." He grins lazily, his eyes red and half-lidded.

"I did have a childhood," Mark says.

Dustin laughs again, and then Chris looks at him and he starts laughing, and then Eduardo's laughing even though he's not stoned and Mark has to laugh too. For a moment he has this swooping sensation, like everything is absolutely fantastically unbelievably perfect – because it is. And even after the feeling has faded, that knowledge remains.

Eduardo kicks off his shoes and pulls off his socks and rolls his sleeves up, leaning back in his chair and sighing while Dustin starts to pack another bowl, filling the evening air with the smell of weed and a long string of stoned chatter that Mark isn't really following.

Eduardo stretches his foot out and nudges Mark gently on the ankle, and when Mark looks over at him he smiles, like this is all he really wanted, nothing more. Mark looks down at his hands where they're resting on his knees, and when he glances up again he catches Chris' eye. Chris' smile is genuine, and he nods. Mark nods back.

He's got to remember to thank Chris properly for this someday.

Soon enough, it's not even eleven at night and they're all pretty much high as kites. Dustin wants to play kickball – he always wants to play kickball – but Mark's yard is the wrong size and it's dark and Chris literally cannot get his foot to connect with the ball, and after he falls spectacularly to the grass on a particularly energetic kick attempt they all decide to give up and lie down with him.

They're scattered, all at angles, the night music of crickets and Chris humming quietly and Dustin laughing soft and stilted. Eduardo nudges his shoulder against Mark's, just beside him, easy and comfortable. Mark sighs and settles into the grass. It's perfectly warm and there's a light breeze and he just feels...lucky, like he stumbled into all of this without trying.

They talk for a while about setting up a projector back here and watching Mystery Science Theatre or the Lion King, come to think of it, which makes Chris snort with laughter.

"Simba," he says, "look at the stars."

He stretches a hand out overhead. Mark looks. It's beautiful. He should let himself appreciate California more.

After that, though, they remember they don't have a projector, so they just pack the bong again and Dustin goes inside to find Mark's guitar, which was a gift and which definitely none of them know how to play.

Eduardo keeps looking at Mark while Dustin plucks tunelessly and smiling softly, sleepy-eyed. He's all limbs now that he's high, loose and fluid, much more than usual. He picks up the guitar once Dustin gives up on it and sits up, folding his long legs beneath him, hunched in one long curving line.

Mark watches, upside down, as Eduardo folds his fingers carefully around the neck, peering at them, tongue between his lips.

He strums. Just one chord – it sound Spanish, summery and light. Eduardo lets it hang for a moment, grinning goofily to himself in a triumphant way that would ruin the effect a little bit if it wasn't so goddamn charming.

Dustin makes a noise of protest when Eduardo sets the guitar carefully back down in the grass.

"Play us a song, Santana," he says. Chris laughs.

"That's the only chord I remember from when I took lessons when I was little," Eduardo says, grinning. "And Santana's Mexican, man."

"Oh my god, play some fucking Santana, dude," Chris sighs, rolling over toward Dustin and the speakers hooked up to his iPod.

Mark is zoning out on Chris' stoned rambling about how the Santana song on Guitar Hero is by far his favorite one when he feels a weight settle on his stomach. He looks down his nose. It's Eduardo's head, his shoulders settled snuggly against Mark's ribs.

Eduardo looks up at him and smiles goofily, laughing on a breath that Mark feels reverberate through him. Every time Mark inhales and exhales Eduardo's head rises and falls a little, rhythmic and calm.

Mark threads the fingers of one hand tentatively through Eduardo's hair and lies back and tries to adjust somehow. This is the way it's going to be, now. It's real. It's…his. It isn't going anywhere.

It's not half as hard to imagine as he had thought it would be.

"Are you guys going to be a PDA couple?" Dustin asks. Chris pulls a face and goes _eww_ and then bursts into giggles.

Eduardo laughs again, too, and Mark feels it inside the space of his ribs, through his chest. He flushes and he's not sure if it's because of Dustin's question or because of Eduardo, but either way he doesn't say anything. He doesn't want to make promises he can't keep.

They finish off the couple of grams Chris had brought, and Eduardo works a hand soft over Mark's back as he rides out a coughing fit on the harsh, ashy end of it. Mark shakes his head back and forth, trying to tamp down the burn in his lungs, until he feels Eduardo's fingers combing lightly through the hair at the nape of his neck and he calms a little, and soon enough it's over and he feels way, way higher than he has yet.

He voices this thought to the peanut gallery, but they're not listening. Chris is on some sort of intense soliloquy about how he's perceiving the world macroscopically and, like, molecules are golf balls and he's swimming in them and stuff. Chris is a definitely a champ when he's stoned, but all his talking is making Mark tired.

He flops back onto the grass and becomes aware that Eduardo's hand had still been half-tangled in his hair when Eduardo gets pulled down with him. They curl together loose and lazy on the cool grass, Eduardo's hand spread on the rise of Mark's neck at his collarbone and his other arm pillowed behind Mark's head. Mark turns his face and tucks it against Eduardo's cheek and breathes in through his nose.

"Are you smelling me?" Eduardo says. Mark feels his lips move against his jaw.

"No," he mumbles. He gets a mouthful of grass for his trouble, and he wishes he could try that again at a different angle, one that might get him a mouthful of Eduardo instead.

He reels momentarily at the realization that it wasn't even six hours ago that he didn't have this – that he had Eduardo, and that this hung in potential between them, that he had all the parts of the puzzle but not the completed picture – and that now he does.

He's stoned. He knows he is. But it doesn't make it any less fantastic. In fact, it probably makes it more fantastic.

"Can you believe that earlier tonight, we weren't even…?" The words huff warm over Mark's skin as Eduardo speaks.

"I literally just thought that," Mark says, and Eduardo kind of giggles to himself, breathless, and Mark angles his head back to look him in the face and _fuck_ he's _right there_ , and there's an moment where all the air goes and everything's on mute and Mark is zeroed in with bright-white heart-pounding tunnel vision on Eduardo tangled against him, his eyes dark and a million eyelashes and the little smile on his lips fading slowly into something more serious, long lines of his body over Mark's skin and the warmth of him and how easy it would be to close the space between them and then, at the end of it, the wonderful shock that he _could_ close it if he wanted to and it would be absolutely perfectly alright.

Somewhere very, very far away, he hears someone stifle a laugh. He lifts his head, feeling a little dizzy, and the trance breaks.

"I think that might be our cue," Dustin says, grinning, elbowing Chris, who's literally watching them with his chin propped up in his hands like they're putting on a puppet show or something.

There are a number of threatening things Mark would like to say, but he can't find the energy, so he settles for a glare that probably just makes him look like he's falling asleep.

Dustin stands up and hoists Chris to his feet by the hand. "Come on, Chris," he says. "Stick to the plan."

Eduardo waves cheerfully, rolling over in the grass. Mark just shakes his head at them.

"Put the spare key back where you found it," he calls to Dustin.

"When I'm done making a copy!"

The screen door slides shut with a definitive _shuck_ , and, okay. Mark guesses this means they're in phase two.

Eduardo's already smiling at him when he turns back, in that soft way that Mark always feels weirdly, in the back of his mind, like he doesn't deserve.

He pulls his knees up loose against his chest and licks his lips.

"Now what," he says, and the words fall flat out of his mouth but his heart is pounding. Eduardo just looks up at the sky, chest rising and falling as he breathes. Mark watches him. The tension in his body feels potent, nervous and excited and anticipatory.

"This is crazy," he murmurs. He turns to Eduardo. "Wardo, isn't this crazy?"

Eduardo rolls his head languidly on his neck to look at Mark, and then he sits up in a long arc.

"Mark," he says, and he catches Mark by the shoulder so that he turns.

"This is allowed to happen, you know?" he says. "I mean, I just, I really like you." He grins to himself, two soft smudges of color rising across his cheeks. "I sound like I'm seventeen," he says. "But…sometimes you just like someone. And then, you know…this happens."

"I know," Mark says, even though he's shaking his head. His mind is filling up with Eduardo's words like lines of code spiraling of their own accord across a screen, blurring together with the beat of a pulse.

"And it's fine," Eduardo says. He nudges a little closer to Mark and Mark feels like this is square one again except all his wild excitement has been replaced by an aching kind of fear, not bad fear but fear that wraps around his heart and makes him desperate to make everything be perfect. He'd never really known that kind of feeling before he met Eduardo.

Eduardo is tucked against Mark now, all warm, easy presence, and he says, "Right?" on a little catch of breath. Mark brings him into focus and Eduardo's got this look on his face, kind of tremulous, expectant, waiting, and Mark realizes that this is one of those moments where Eduardo needs to get something real back from Mark like what he gives.

Mark doesn't know how to show anything. He knows Eduardo knows that, and yet he knows that Eduardo always expects him to be…better than that, too, somehow.

It's so unexpected to be pushed like this. But something about Eduardo makes Mark really want to live up to it.

He decides to blame it on the weed for now. He stands up, ignoring the slight weakness in his knees, and holds out his hand to Eduardo.

"Do you want to go inside?" he asks quietly, and Eduardo smiles, exactly like that was everything he needed to hear. He takes Mark's hand and lets himself be pulled to his feet.

The house is dark and quiet. Mark sets the guitar down in the kitchen and looks around for Eduardo. He's standing in the door to the hallway, and he smiles. Mark's heart is still pounding, and he's still thinking _this is crazy this is crazy this is crazy_ but it's rather more than a little too late to worry about that.

Maybe that's why he follows Eduardo into his room. Or maybe it's because he could never, ever say no to the look on Eduardo's face.

He feels like he's in a trance, padding barefoot across the hall carpet, following Eduardo into the dark bedroom and closing the door behind him. Eduardo sits on the edge of the bed, his face lit low by the moonlight through the slats of the blinds and the glow of the clock radio.

They don't say anything, but even though Mark's head is still spinning slightly, the world trembling on its axis, he feels far from as giggly as they were five minutes ago.

He steps forward and kneels in front of Eduardo and puts his hands on his thighs, and Eduardo curls his fingers behind Mark's neck, one nudging into the space below his ear, solid against the rise of his spine, and he leans down and pulls Mark in and kisses him, just off-center. His skin smells rough and heady with weed and grass and night air, and Mark noses into it, sighing as Eduardo licks slow into his mouth, his other hand at Mark's jaw now, thumbing upward, over his cheek, the papery hollow beneath his eye.

His fingers nudge behind Mark's ear and he pulls him in a little harder, and Mark says, "Yeah," breathless, and he pulls back and stands and watches for a moment as Eduardo slides back on the bed and Mark clambers over top of him, one knee between Eduardo's, and it's kind of hard to get coordinated but now he's half in Eduardo's lap and he's wrapped around him and they're just kissing like they have all the time in the world and this, this, this is perfect.

"Wardo," he gasps out, and he pulls back and looks at him so close he feels like they're melting together. The air is getting blurred, greys and blues and blacks and Eduardo right in front of him smiling softly, whispering against his cheek so low Mark can barely make it out, _I know_.

He puts his hands on Mark's waist and tugs a little until Mark gets the hint and adjusts so that he's straddling him oh god he's actually _straddling_ him, and then Eduardo grips a little harder and plants his lips beneath Mark's ear and pulls him in and down at the hips.

Mark groans, a sharp, short burst against Eduardo's ear, and they do it again and again until it's a stuttering rhythm and Mark is hard in his jeans and he's all lips against Eduardo's skin, mouthing open along his throat, desperate to hold onto him, hair soft between his fingers and everything shushing breaths and the wet catch of tongues and the hot pressure of his hips rolling against Eduardo's and then Eduardo's hands are fumbling with the hem of his shirt and yeah, _that_. Everything is muddling and Mark feels like he's slipping along the edges of this, slipping into Eduardo, and he throws his shirt on the floor and sucks a kiss into the hollow of Eduardo's throat and then time speeds up again, Mark's mind comes back into focus and he lets go.

And it's not long before – they're naked and trembling against each other – Eduardo's sucking bruises along Mark's collarbones and he murmurs that it's just to watch him color and Mark laughs and it all just feels fucking amazing – Eduardo's talking him through it, a hand around his wrist, encouraging, and Mark's eyes start to water from not blinking as he watches the way Eduardo's face flickers and his lips drop open and his eyebrows pinch as Mark slides two slick fingers into him. He has the sense that if this ever ends, though that doesn't feel possible, that it'll be hard to extricate himself from this sweat-slicked limb-knotted tangle of the two of them jumbled together, Eduardo everything around him, so much that he almost forgets to breathe because he's watching Eduardo breathe and that feels like it's enough.

It only gets a little scary when Eduardo's legs are wrapped around his waist, ankles locked sharp at the small of his back, nudging him in as slow as he can. His breathing is loud and heavy and every now and then Mark hears his own name on an exhale. His mind is a riot of white static and the impossibly tight feel of Eduardo and the realization that Jesus _Christ_ this is _happening_ , and his hips falter and he catches Eduardo's eyes, really catches them, trying to make sure that this is okay, that it's going to be okay, that they can do this and have it just be a part of the way this thing is growing into something Mark never in a million years could have dreamt up.

He thinks that with the little hitch in Eduardo's exhale, with the brush of his lips over Mark's cheek and the tight, warm press of his hands on his back that the answer is yes. It's humbling and comforting and it makes him want to cant his hips the best way he can just to see the arch of Eduardo's body beneath his, makes him want to touch every part of him he can reach, to never let go. It fits itself snug and wonderful into a place inside of Mark that had felt empty before this.

At the end, stumbling forward with the rising pitch of Eduardo's gasping breaths and Mark's whole body shaking through it, they come together, and Mark thinks it feels like a promise.

He shifts off of Eduardo after, lies back on the bed with a hand stretched over his head, fingers brushing the wall. The room smells like sex, and he can feel Eduardo's steady breathing beside him, easing slowly.

Eventually he sits up and turns to face the window, running a hand hard over his face. Everything is catching up with him fuzzily. It feels like he's waking up after a night of drinking and he's still a little drunk.

He feels Eduardo's fingers ghost over the base of his spine and he arches out a little beneath it before turning back to look. Eduardo is watching him sleepily, turned on his side, eyes lidded.

"You okay?" he says. His voice is low and rough.

Mark doesn't say anything. Something slightly painful is taking place inside of him as he looks at Eduardo, this bizarrely wonderful person who had wanted to make a friend of him, and had wanted to take care of him, and had wanted to find this person inside him that Mark hadn't known was there.

"This is kind of intense," he says quietly after a while.

Eduardo gives a soft exhalation of laughter in the back of his throat. "Yeah," he says. "I know."

Mark keeps staring at him. It feels like there's something fighting to get out of him and he's sort of afraid of what it might be.

It's a relief, then, when Eduardo says, "Do you wanna sleep?"

Mark nods automatically. He hadn't realized how bonelessly tired he was until right now. His eyelids droop momentarily and Eduardo chuckles again, tugging gently on Mark's hip with his fingertips.

"C'mere," he murmurs.

Mark lies back down and tugs the sheets half over himself. Eduardo's arm is draped across his stomach and after a moment Mark shifts so that they're nudged loose and warm together, Mark tucked against Eduardo's chest with his nose brushing his neck. Their legs tangle, Eduardo's toes tracing the dip of Mark's ankle.

Mark hasn't actually _slept_ with a person that many times, and when he has it's always felt heinously tense, being so hyperaware of how they're touching each other, paying taut, uncomfortable attention to their movements.

But now, with Eduardo…Mark thinks it would feel more uncomfortable not to touch him, or not to feel every minute tremble of his limbs or catalogue his breaths. He just. He has a lot of feelings, about this. He doesn't know how else to put it.

"Good night," he breathes into Eduardo's shoulder, and immediately he feels a little stupid.

Eduardo tucks his nose into Mark's hair.

"Good night," he murmurs back. His fingers brush across Mark's ribs like he's counting them, and the rhythm of his breathing is like a lullaby, so close and familiar that Mark falls asleep within a minute.

***

The first thing Mark notices when he wakes up in the morning is that his mouth tastes like pure evil. The second thing is that he's having trouble sitting up.

The third thing is that he's having trouble sitting up because Eduardo's arm is draped heavily across his chest, and the fourth thing is that Eduardo is lying naked on his stomach next to him, face toward turned Mark, breathing shallowly in his sleep.

So, last night happened, apparently.

Mark finds this wonderfully easy to accept.

He shifts slightly, tonguing at the cottony roof of his mouth. Eduardo is warm against him and he wants to roll over beneath that weight and nose into the hollow of Eduardo's throat and go back to sleep, but it's Monday, and he needs to tend to his weed hangover with a cup of coffee and assess how much of a problem it would be for him to come late to the office today, say maybe sometime after Eduardo o'clock, if there ever will be such a time again.

He lifts Eduardo's arm off himself gingerly, frowning as the cold rushes in, and then he sits up. From this angle he can see Eduardo's sleeping face and it catches him a little off-guard. Eduardo always seems to have a light kind of air to him, but he looks so comparatively serene and care-free this way that Mark feels a little pang. He wishes Eduardo would realize that he doesn't need to carry that weight all the time.

He doesn't want to wake him, but at the same time he wants to take a shower and in that sense he kind of does want to wake him. But he supposes, with a tiny, delirious smile, that there will be plenty of time for that down the road.

It's probably lucky, though, that by the time he's standing under the spray shaking a hand through his wet hair and considering jerking off to the memory of the way Eduardo's hands felt gripping at his shoulderblades last night as Mark pushed slowly into him, that the curtain draws back and Eduardo is standing there, naked, sleepy, blushing.

Mark gapes.

"Can I join you?" Eduardo says. He smiles, glances down briefly as though he's embarrassed, then looks back up into Mark's eyes again.

Mark reaches out and touches his hip, watching the way it leaves his tan skin wet and shining. A rivulet of water runs down into the dip at the top of Eduardo's skinny thigh.

He looks back up. Eduardo is still, for some unfathomable reason, waiting for permission. Mark glances incredulously to one side.

"Um, yes," he says, prompting. Eduardo grins and steps over the side of the tub.

And this is why Mark is already hopelessly late for work by the time they're standing in the kitchen drinking coffee like they've done countless times before, but he can't really bring himself to care about that. He's left his phone in the living room and he knows he's probably missing a series of increasingly insistent texts from his assistant and also from Dustin asking if they "did it" and was he planning to come back to the office sometime this century or had he and Eduardo eloped already, but Eduardo wants to make breakfast and so it doesn't matter.

He watches it all happening like he's having an out of body experience. This just – this isn't the kind of thing that happens in his life, Eduardo standing at the stove talking happily about nothing in a t-shirt and a pair of sweatpants that are both Mark's because his own clothes from yesterday smelled like weed, flipping pancakes, laughing when Mark looks at them like he's never seen anything so ridiculous in his life.

Mark grabs him around the waist as he's piling their plates with second helpings and kisses him soft and slow against the counter, and there's actually syrup in the corners of Eduardo's mouth and this is getting kind of fucking ridiculous but Mark can't bring himself to do anything but feel a little giddy, and a lot – he thinks it just once, just for a fleeting second, and it actually makes him so light-headed with terror and exhilaration that he has to forcibly file it away to be dealt with at a later date – a lot in love.

***

Mark is expecting to get hell from Dustin and Chris when he meanders into the office that afternoon with a hickey under his ear, but they're actually pretty chill. Chris smiles and Mark ignores him, feeling hot, and Dustin gives him a low-five as he passes by his desk, which Mark only returns only so Dustin won't make a scene.

The office is quiet that day in the only way it's ever quiet, which means it's buzzing softly with steady productivity and low-level excitement and Jesus, there's a lot to do, to catch up on, Mark hadn't even realized. He doesn't begrudge Eduardo the distraction – if he'd ever been concerned about that they wouldn't have come this far to begin with. It's 2007, though, and Mark's never had to juggle like this, Eduardo and the past few months and yesterday and last night and god, _this morning_ and then, on the other hand – Facebook, which has for the longest time been really the only thing he's had.

It's strange. He kind of shakes his head, ignores an inappropriate email from Dustin, and tries to go into a computer-lit trance for the rest of the day. His hands and neck are stiff when it's finished, but Eduardo comes over that night and they make spaghetti and, just, good lord, this thing they have. Mark can't get over it. Eduardo rubs his shoulders until it's like the day never happened, except for everything he got done, and it's almost as though he could have it both ways.

They all go to a Giants game in San Fran in early August, and there's cold beer and seats two rows behind home plate under a bright blue sky and it's perfect, Eduardo's arm around his shoulders, all of it so easy. Eduardo has never had cotton candy before because he's not from America or whatever so Dustin buys him some and they feel very much like the youngest 23- and 24-year-olds in the park.

Mark is watching the way the spun sugar is catching, sticky pink, on Eduardo's fingertips and in the corner of his mouth., but he flushes and looks down at the field when Eduardo glances at him and grins knowingly.

He's mentally bemoaning the stadium's lack of secluded places out of the view of bros and small children when Eduardo slings an arm around his neck and leans in and kisses him full on the mouth. Mark is too stunned to do anything but kiss back, grasping helplessly at Eduardo's shoulder. He catches a bright little flash of sweet on his tongue when Eduardo pulls away, flushed, his mouth red.

Dustin wolf-whistles and Chris laughs and everybody goes back to what they were doing.

"Was that okay?" Eduardo says, arm still around Mark's shoulders, leaning over to talk at a normal volume into his ear.

"Yeah," Mark says, and when Eduardo still looks unconvinced, Mark turns his head and kisses him quickly again, trying to say, _see?_

"Wardo, it's okay." He feels kind of light-headed, that he's kissing Eduardo like this, _Eduardo_ for Christ's sake, so easily, in public, at a goddamn Giants game.

They go for drinks in the Haight after. It's a fairly welcome change from the worn familiarity Silicon Valley, and it's also a reminder that god damn, they are rich. They're in their 20s and they have so much money. They can do anything.

Mark tries not to think of that too often. He doesn't want to live as though it's not there – just as though it doesn't matter, because really, there's so much of it that it doesn't at this point. But still, it makes him dizzy with possibility and reality and it brings back a hint of that old feeling, _and what else is there for me?_

Except there's Eduardo this time.

So. Yes. There's that.

The bar in the Haight is frighteningly loud and disgustingly hip and they start with shots, which kind of sets the tone for the evening. Chris has volunteered himself as DD, bless his responsible little soul, so they go a tiny bit wild. There are arcade games along one wall and Dustin is chatting up a girl over Pacman. Mark thinks this may be the best thing that has ever happened to Dustin in his life.

Chris is texting and Mark's head is pounding in time to the bass and the table in their crowded little booth is littered with empty glasses of all shapes and sizes. By before midnight they've had no less than three outrageous high-volume arguments with plaid-wearing strangers about things like TED and Mark isn't really following any of this anymore, to be honest, when Eduardo leans in and nudges his knee between Mark's beneath the table and murmurs, his breath warm and alcoholic against Mark's cheek, "Wanna get out of here?"

Mark nods rapidly, which causes the room to spin slightly. He looks at Chris, who is pointedly ignoring them, and then over at Dustin, solidly installed with Pacman girl, and his mind zeroes in on one thing: _hotel_.

"We're taking off," he says loudly to Chris, who looks up in surprise.

"The car…?" he says, gesturing vaguely with his thumb.

"We're gonna get a room," Mark says, and he feels Eduardo giggling, his breath hot on Mark's neck, and Chris rolls his eyes.

"Should ask for the honeymoon suite," he says, but he smiles, and Mark smiles back. Thank God for Chris, seriously. He makes things so much easier.

They wave uselessly to Dustin and stumble out down the street, Eduardo's arm around Mark's waist, lips fumbling at his ear as they walk with drunken nothings that become increasingly filthy until Mark's face is hot and he looks at Eduardo reprovingly. Eduardo bursts out laughing and Mark pulls him into the lobby of a likely-looking little boutique place with lots of classy velvet and dark wood and a pretty receptionist in a black dress.

"Hi," he says. Eduardo grins and waves at her, and she smiles at them. Mark has come to realize that he tends to get that smile from women when he's with Eduardo. It's sort of ironic, but he doesn't really mind.

"We'd like a room," he says, stiltedly, "um, a suite, or anything you have."

"Sure," she says, grinning down at her keyboard as she starts to type. His New York ID gets him a second glance and he's not sure if it's because she recognizes the name or just because he's on the wrong coast, and he tries not to worry about gossip, Valleywag or what the fuck ever. It's worth it either way.

Soon enough they're in the warm dark of a lovely little suite and Eduardo is tripping over Mark's feet as he walks him backwards into the room, and they're both laughing into each other's mouths, breath catching. Mark knocks something over but it's too dark to see and they both look at each other and Mark kind of grins, and then Eduardo pulls his shirt off and pushes him back until he falls onto the bed and that's that.

They stand on the little balcony afterward and look down at the street, still lively even though it's late, and Eduardo slips a casual arm around his waist and bumps their hips together and it's all just scary normal, just like it had always been this way, which in a way, Mark supposes, it had.

But it's also wonderful, if a person like him is even allowed to use a word like that, it's unbelievable and shockingly stable and it's just _nice_. It's dinner, and really it's dates, and it's a lot of sex, and just – domesticity, for lack of a better word. Mark's house starts to feel more the way the house of someone like him getting on in their 20s should feel, with Eduardo kissing him in the foyer, with the two of them actually eating at the dining room table. The sheets of the double bed rumpled on both sides.

Mark still doesn't know how to quantify any of this. His stomach lurches, not necessarily unpleasantly, every time he thinks back to that moment that first morning where he'd thought a certain L word – kind of the same way his stomach still lurches every time he catches sight of Eduardo smiling at him like he's literally the most wonderful thing in the universe.

But, so, yes. Things are great. Until one day they're kind of not.

"I might have to leave." Eduardo's voice is a half-murmur into the dark of Mark's bedroom. It's late August, the end of the summer. "I mean. My father wants me to come back out to Miami for a couple of days."

His arm is slung over Mark's chest beneath the sheets, and Mark holds very still for a moment.

"So it's a couple of days," he says cautiously.

He feels Eduardo shift beside him.

"It's," Eduardo starts jerkily. There's a low, hoarse undertone to his voice. "One of the people I met back in July, he, he might have something for me." He hides his face against Mark's neck and says, muffled, "An investment placement with J.P. Morgan. In New York."

He keeps his face turned into the crook of Mark's shoulder as he says it. Mark can feel his eyelashes on his skin.

"New York," Mark repeats. All the air in the room, particles of dust in the air, everything feels like it's frozen in place.

Eduardo lifts his head. "I mean, I don't know," he says anxiously. Mark looks over at him.

"Why would you go to New York?" he says.

"It'd be a big step up," Eduardo says. He does not sound very enthusiastic.

"Says your father."

"Mark," Eduardo says, placating.

"All your investments are here," Mark says.

"Most."

 _I'm here_ , Mark thinks, but he doesn't say it out loud.

Eduardo's thumb strokes softly along his throat.

"I just don't get why you even need to go," Mark says brusquely after a moment, like Eduardo can't feel his heart pounding in his chest.

"It's my father," Eduardo says. "And...you know, my career, and it's only a couple of days. And. I don't know yet, I don't know anything."

Mark actually laughs.

"Mark," Eduardo says again.

 _Stop it_ , Mark wants to say, he wants to take Eduardo by the shoulders and shake him, _don't you realize?_

But he only shrugs again. "If it's what you want," he says quietly.

Eduardo presses his lips flat to Mark's shoulder. He looks so sad.

"Wardo," Mark says, chewing on the inside of his cheek, unable to keep a slightly anguished note out of his voice, "Jesus, you're an adult."

"I know," Eduardo says softly into Mark's skin.

"So, what, then?" Mark is struggling so much. He's terrified he won't be able to make Eduardo understand.

Eduardo just shakes his head. "I don't know," he says. "I'm just going to see." He traces a small circle against the hard plane of tension that is Mark's chest. "I'm spinning my wheels out here."

"Everyone's spinning their wheels," Mark says. "At a certain point it just becomes your life."

Eduardo bites his lip, avoiding Mark's eyes.

"Not all of us are in the kind of position we can just stay in forever," he says quietly, and there is the tiniest edge to his voice. Mark doesn't know if he's ever heard it before. He frowns.

"Are we having a fight?" he asks after a moment.

Eduardo laughs and it feels so good to hear. "I don't know," he says. "No. I don't think so."

"Just stay," Mark blurts, completely without meaning to. He winces.

Eduardo shakes his head, two wide arcs back and forth.

"I don't want to go either," he says. "But I have to see. I can't not."

Mark wants to say, _can't you?_ but this conversation is starting to make him ache a little, a lot, so he keeps his mouth shut, and his eyes slide closed when after a moment Eduardo leans in, brushes a kiss against his eyelashes, beside his nose, over his lips. Mark pulls him in with a hand at the back of his neck then, licking into his mouth, biting his lip softly, trying to put a lot of unsaid things into it.

Eduardo's forehead lingers against his for a moment when it's over, his eyes closed, though Mark's are open and he's looking, trying to internalize the close contours of Eduardo's face. Then Eduardo curls against him, their legs tangling together. He closes his eyes too quickly. Though it doesn't feel like there's anger or anything lingering, they don't speak, and Mark stares at the ceiling and feels absolutely sick.

***

Mark wakes up slow the next morning, the last Saturday in August. His head is fuzzy with what he supposes must be an emotional hangover. Eduardo is still asleep, his long limbs all lodged into the spaces of Mark's body beneath the sheets, and Mark extricates himself quietly and spends a long time in the shower being pensive in that sort of way where he's not actually thinking about anything, he's just frowning semi-meaningfully at the soap tray. He feels about as unhappy when he's done.

Eduardo is cross-legged on the bed, doing something on his phone, when Mark comes back into the bedroom in boxers and a t-shirt. He looks up as Mark closes the bathroom door behind him.

"Hi," he says.

"Hi," Mark says.

Eduardo takes a deep breath and looks Mark in the eye. "I wanted to try and explain better."

Mark leans against the doorframe, shaking a hand through his wet curls. "Okay."

Eduardo frowns to one side. "I just, I mean, you don't know my father," and when Mark opens his mouth he says, "no, you _don't_ , 'cause if you did you might see why…not at least _seeing_ isn't an option."

"Well," Mark says, "I don't know him, so no, I don't see why not."

Eduardo looks slightly pained. "It's J.P. Morgan, Mark."

"And it's New York."

Eduardo takes a little unhappy breath, one quick rise and fall of his chest, his eyebrows knit. He's not looking at Mark anymore, instead staring to one side like he's trying to think of the right words.

Mark wants to say, _what does it make us, if you're thinking this way_ , but instead he throws Eduardo a bone. "If I don't get it, then try to make me," he says, trying to soften his voice a little.

"Okay," Eduardo says with conviction. He pauses a moment, then says, "Just doing whatever out here investing in things isn't a sustainable position for me. And without Pai I don't have any weight to put behind anything. Like, I'm too young. He introduces me to people, he knows what – what's the best next step." He lets out a breath, a bit shaky. "It's always been like that."

"Father knows best," Mark says dryly.

"And maybe it won't be forever," Eduardo continues over him, looking a little agitated, "but I'm young, I am. So – so maybe New York, I mean, maybe that's what it's got to be for now, I can't just – decide it's not."

"Right, that's where you lose me," Mark says quietly. He watches Eduardo intently from his place by the door. "If it's _your_ decision then that is what it is. But not his, Wardo."

Eduardo shrugs helplessly.

"I could tell you it's what I want and at this point you probably wouldn't believe me," he says with a singularly humorless laugh.

"That might be true," Mark says, but he feels kind of bad now. Eduardo's got his chin in his hands, elbows on his knees.

"Hey," he says, and he very nearly takes a step forward, wanting to touch Eduardo, to do something right – but he doesn't, and he doesn't say anything else. There's a lump in his throat that feels less like pent-up emotion and more like something wanting to get out that he keeps tamping down, and he swallows around it and tries not to think about much of anything.

Eduardo sighs.

"Want to go out for breakfast?" he says finally.

"Sure," Mark says, and he gives Eduardo a little smile that seems to take a good deal of the weight off his shoulders, which makes Mark happy in a slightly sad way, if that's possible.

They're in the car after Eduardo showers and Mark fails to take anything meaningful away from his email when Eduardo says, "It's not you, you know."

Mark looks away, into the side mirror, so he won't have to meet Eduardo's eyes.

"I know," he says. _I'm not the reason you want to go,_ he thinks, _but you are every reason I want you to stay_.

***

Bringing it up at lunch on Monday is like pulling teeth, but even Mark knows he's so well out of his element that he has no choice but to get a couple of outside opinions.

"Nah," Dustin says dismissively when Mark has brought him and Chris up to speed. "Eduardo? No way. He'll come crawling back, he knows he loves us."

"Isn't that Gossip Girl?" Chris interjects.

"Maybe."

"That doesn't even come on for like three weeks, what, did you read the books?" Chris grins and takes a bite of his sandwich. " _I_ didn't even read the books," he says with his mouth full. "No one with a Y chromosome has ever read the books."

"I've just seen previews," Dustin sniffs.

"Guys," Mark says. "Focus."

"Sorry, sorry," Chris says. "I don't know what you're so worried about, though. I really can't see him moving away. I mean…everything is here for him."

His eyes linger on Mark as he says it, and Mark looks away, chewing on his lip.

"It seems like it might be real," he says quietly.

"Why?" Dustin asks.

Mark scowls. "Bullshit about his father. And he said…" he pauses, calling up the exact words. "He's 'spinning his wheels out here.'"

"Aren't we all," says Dustin.

"That's what I said," Mark says. "But – he kept talking about how he wasn't in a position where he could just stay."

"Like you," Dustin adds delicately. Mark shrugs unhappily, and Dustin claps him on the shoulder.

"Look," he says. "Just, you know, profess your undying love for the dude. That always works in movies."

Mark doesn't say anything. He's trying to pretend the thought hasn't crossed his mind a million times already, and he suspects Chris can see straight through it, but if he does he doesn't mention it.

Chris catches him after lunch, though, predictably.

"Hey," he says.

Mark nods and braces himself.

"I really don’t think you should worry," Chris says quietly. "Seriously, I just can't picture it, him wanting to go, I mean, so soon—"

He bites his lip.

"Just, you don't want it to be like you're making him give something up, to, whatever, to be with you," Chris says. "I think that's probably it."

"I'm not asking that."

"Well, you don't mean to, but—"

"I'm not," Mark says. "It's not that I…" he grimaces, "don't want him to be successful, fuck. It's just – the way he's doing it, I mean, the reasons—"

"Have you told him that?"

"Yes."

"Have you really?"

"As far as I know," Mark bites out.

Chris studies him for a moment, then shrugs.

"Maybe Dustin's onto something."

Mark rolls his eyes and Chris holds up his hands.

"I'm just saying."

"Yeah," Mark says. "Well, we'll see."

Chris nods.

"Your pitying expression is certainly filling me with confidence," Mark says, deadpan, and he retreats into his office and glares at the glass walls until his computer makes a noise and he's pulled back into distractions.

***

The week rolls on with that detached sense of trepidation that comes with looming inevitabilities. Though they're okay, mostly, they're trying. They're not unhappy, they're laughing and Eduardo's touching him on the shoulder and Mark still feels like he's lucky almost every moment of it, only now it's accompanied by a little pang, too. And Eduardo is still leaving for Miami Saturday afternoon and Mark is just trying not to think about it. If he doesn't make it important, it won't be, he thinks. If they don't make it seem real then it won't happen. That's the best he can hope for.

Or at least he doesn't see another option, because Eduardo isn't changing his mind, at least not about Miami, at least not yet. It's only the first step, he says. It's only to see, he keeps saying, over and over.

Mark asks just once whatever happened to Eduardo being sick of his father controlling his life, like he'd told him what feels like a long time ago now, and Eduardo says something edgy about how it's not like _he_ doesn't want to work for J.P. Morgan and Mark gives up. He hopes the look on his face is enough to make his feelings known.

They see a movie on Thursday because Eduardo says Mark needs a little culture, and afterward at Eduardo's place the light is soft and yellow and Eduardo is already kissing him when he pulls him down on the couch. It all feels routine and familiar and broken-in but in a wonderful way, a way that Mark really, really thinks he could get used to.

Eduardo stretches out and tugs Mark into his lap and their clothes begin to fall away seemingly of their own accord. Mark's mind is in a hundred places, the same as it always is, the same as it was all during the movie and in the car and maybe a little less as he looked down at Eduardo looking up at him from the couch, but he zeroes in with the first little whine that escapes Eduardo's lips as Mark's thigh nudges between his own. Mark is here, and so is Eduardo, and that's more than he'll be able to say come this weekend. It's more than he might be able to say ever again in a few weeks' time.

The thought makes him shudder, and he knows he's being dramatic but he still slots himself closer against Eduardo, as close as he can get, wrapping his arms around his shoulders and sliding his hands through his hair, kissing him like it's the only thing. He loves the way Eduardo feels beneath him, loves the smell of his skin, loves the insistency of his hands on Mark's lower back.

He pulls back and looks at Eduardo, kind of frowning, their faces close.

"Mark…" Eduardo says softly, like he senses some of the badly repressed panic Mark is feeling at the nagging thought of Eduardo leaving him here all alone. Mark shakes his head.

"Don't," he says, so quietly he thinks Eduardo might not have heard, and then suddenly he's sliding down his chest. He wants Eduardo so much, and he wants to pretend like this is how it could be…forever, or something, like nothing is ever going to have to change. He hopes he can convince Eduardo to want it too.

He licks down Eduardo's stomach, skating one hand up and down the rails of his ribs, across his stomach, feeling the way his body jumps. Eduardo throws his head back and bites his lip hard when Mark flicks his tongue against the inside of his thigh, and Mark watches, breath huffing over Eduardo's cock, absently fingering the soft skin beneath his navel.

"Tease," Eduardo chokes out, and Mark smirks before licking a stripe up his cock from base to tip and sliding his lips down over the head. He loves how responsive Eduardo is most of all, how he has to hold him down at the hips and give him a stern look because he's moving so much. And he loves the little whine that Eduardo makes in the back of his throat, the way Eduardo says his name on shaky breaths, "Mark, _Mark_."

Really he loves everything about Eduardo. It's funny how easy that is to think, even though something not too far off from it is so, so hard.

He keeps his eyes on Eduardo's as he works his tongue in sweeping circles, watching Eduardo waver between staring down at him and staring at the ceiling and squeezing his eyes shut like he's just trying to hold it together. There's a hand in Mark's hair at some point and he doesn't remember it getting there but he hums at Eduardo's fingers on his scalp, behind his ear, and he pushes his head all the way down, lips wet and stretched wide and breathing through his nose, and he hears Eduardo mutter, "Fuck, Mark," and his voice is completely broken and Jesus Christ, when did Mark get this turned on?

His voice hoarse in his throat, he lifts his head with an obscene sort of pop and gasps, "Wardo, I need—"

"Yeah," Eduardo says, scrambling at nothing, back against the arm of the couch, his legs falling open. Mark gets his pants the rest of the way off and looks around wildly.

"Wait, wait," Eduardo says, and he leaps off the couch, disappearing in the direction of his bedroom. Mark stares after him for about ten seconds before coming to his senses and following.

Eduardo meets him in the doorway of his room, lube and condom in hand. "What," he says, and Mark pushes him back toward his bed.

"Here," he says, crawling over Eduardo on top of the sheets, and Eduardo smiles at him and for some reason it is such a relief.

Mark cradles his hand behind Eduardo's neck when he rocks slowly into him a short while later, their foreheads tipped together, everything hot skin and close breathing. He feels Eduardo's thighs tight around his hips and tries to find a halting sort of rhythm, pushing in deep, panting into Eduardo's skin as he listens to him moan. Eduardo is loudest when he's sober, which Mark finds kind of funny, and also kind of hot.

He can feel by the way Eduardo is trembling that he's close already, and he fumbles a hand over his cock, brushing his lips over Eduardo's cheek, feeling his eyelashes, whispering his name and _come on_ and Eduardo whimpers and his hands are clutching at Mark's back hard enough to leave scratches and then with a groan Mark drives all the way into him and Eduardo comes, holding onto Mark like he's the only thing keeping him there, gasping it out beneath him.

Mark's still thrusting into him, his breathing tight and shallow in the back of his throat like he can't get enough air, and Eduardo looks at him all flushed and heavy-lidded and _oh, God damn you,_ Mark thinks as he speeds up, and he thinks it again when Eduardo catches his lips in a messy kiss, and then one more time, weak and wild, as he comes on a long push, buried all the way in Eduardo with his face against his neck, the two of them wrapped so close around each other that Mark can't find the space between.

Eduardo holds him for a little while longer afterward. There's no sense of urgency and no real need to extricate themselves, and anyway Mark doesn't trust himself to lift his head from its place in the crook of Eduardo's shoulder yet. There's something thick curdling in his throat, turning down the corners of his mouth and making his chest ache, and he's afraid, just for now, to let Eduardo see his eyes.

***

He meets some of Eduardo's work colleagues for maybe the first time on Friday, and they don't act like a couple, though they don't act like they're not close or whatever as friends, either.

"This is Mark," Eduardo says, and they all nod knowingly, sparing him the trouble of elaborating. It's such a boys' club here in Palo Alto, even still. Mark is used to being known. He takes a sip of his drink and nods and tries not to wonder what Eduardo would have introduced as him given the rest of a chance.

They stand around talking and Mark is sort of surprised to remember just how much he really dislikes most investors. Eduardo was so very much the exception to the rule. These guys – mid-twenties or older, smarmy, skinny ties and whiskey sours. _Pricks,_ Mark thinks, but he feels Eduardo's hand skim momentarily over the small of his back and he forces a stiff smile. Eduardo talks business but he seems kind of happy to do so, he seems into it, at least, and Mark wonders if it's really what he loves the most.

He thinks about New York again. _Tomorrow._ He gets another whiskey.

Outside, the air has that first little bite of fall, and Mark pulls Eduardo into the dark space between two streetlights and pushes him against the brick exterior of the pub and kisses him, hands at his collar, teeth tugging at his lower lip until he gasps. _Me,_ Mark thinks, _forget them, remember me._

He thinks Eduardo does, from the way he looks at him when they pull apart, breathing hard, one hand tight at Mark's hip. His eyes are dark and he's staring, everything hot and heavy, such close quarters, the little bubble of the two of them in the middle of the cool evening.

"Mark," Eduardo whispers.

"My place?" Mark says, and Eduardo nods.

Mark is a tiny bit drunker than he should be to be driving, only just barely tipsy, really, but still, but he doesn't care. Eduardo spends the first half of the ride with his hand on Mark's upper thigh, and the second half with his fingers tangled with Mark's on the gearshift, and Mark thinks it's kind of absurd how that makes his heart pound so much more.

He grins at Eduardo as he fumbles with his keys at the door, almost nervous, and Eduardo grins back. It reminds Mark of the beginning. It's fucking comforting how easy it still is for them to get back to that place, full of possibility and dawning affection.

The house is dark and quiet and Mark's all set to trip over Eduardo trying to make it to the bedroom, but he's only just gotten the front door closed behind them when Eduardo spins him into the wall and drops to his knees.

"Wardo," Mark rasps. His head is spinning and he doesn't know if it's from the whiskey or from Eduardo nosing against the crotch of his jeans. "You don't—" he starts, with no idea what he's actually going to say.

"Oh, shut up," Eduardo mutters, tongue between his lips, and he undoes Mark's fly and then, Jesus, sucks the head of Mark's hardening cock into his mouth, fucking quick, sliding his lips down slow and Mark thinks he's actually going to go crazy looking at Eduardo down there with his cheeks all hollow so he tips his head back against the wall with a _thunk_. His jeans around his thighs, he fists his hands in Eduardo's hair, trying not to pull but wanting more of that soft hot mouth, that low hum in the back of his throat.

"Fuck," he mutters, and Eduardo makes an interested sort of noise that makes Mark tremble.

"Look at you," he whispers, shaky, staring at Eduardo on his knees, half-between Mark's legs, face flushed and lips stretched. Eduardo looks up at him, eyes dark and round and it's almost too much. "Okay, stop, stop," Mark gasps, touching Eduardo's temple, nudging. Eduardo pulls back and sits on his heels, licking his lips.

"What?" he says, and Mark suppresses a shiver to hear how rough his voice is.

"I – I want you, to, to," he stammers.

"What?" Eduardo says. "I, what?"

"Just come on," Mark says. He tugs his pants up with difficulty and pulls Eduardo up by the hand.

The light is off in Mark's room, but they don't tumble onto the bed like they have plenty of times before. Eduardo closes the door behind him and stands in front of it looking slightly rueful, and Mark tries to steady himself on two feet, unbuttons Eduardo's shirt slowly with careful fingers. It's too late to not let this feel important, and Mark knows that's his fault but he doesn't care. Tomorrow. Fucking tomorrow. And what if he has to make Eduardo see tonight, and what if – what if he's not sure if he'll get another chance.

And then he kind of comes to his senses. It's kind of a snap – he blinks, he looks up into Eduardo's face. His hands ball in the fabric of his shirt. All at once, it's so horrifically, blindingly absurd.

"You can't leave," he says, tugging a little toward nothing, his voice high and hard. His mind sways in and out of sharp, hot focus. "Why would you go to New York?" he asks, trying to put so much force behind it, because he really wants to know, so badly – he really does not understand how it could possibly be happening.

Eduardo slumps back against the wall, half-laughing, running a hand across his face. He looks at Mark a little helplessly. Mark hates that face.

"Just say it," he says when Eduardo doesn't speak immediately, and he sounds angrier than he means to, which he supposes must mean he really is that angry.

"Mark," Eduardo says weakly, "I don't…"

He hangs his head. He looks so tired.

"I don't know," he says, "I want – I want to be with you, I, I wanna be here with you."

"So stay," Mark says. His fingers are curling by their sides, desperate for something to occupy them. He touches the wood veneer of the dresser beside him, an artificial lacquer, cold. He wishes desperately, for perhaps the first time in his life, that he wasn't even a little bit drunk.

Eduardo takes a step forward, curls a hand around Mark's ribs. Mark's body jumps away reflexively then keens into it twice as much.

"Just Miami," Eduardo says. "I'm only going to Miami, first." He looks up at Mark with those dark eyes, rife and sincere beneath the long curve of his brow. "And then," he takes a tiny, gasping breath, "I'll come back."

Mark looks into his face, trying to be sure. And he knows, he _knows_ what he should do now, but God, it's so hard, he aches all over, and he just wants to touch Eduardo, to be with him, it's just so fucking stupid that this is even happening when nothing like this should ever have to happen to the two of them.

He can see how Eduardo's face has gone a little expectant. He sighs quietly through his nose and steps flush against him, cheek against his neck.

"Come – come to bed with me," he says, his voice uncharacteristically low and rough. He feels Eduardo smile. It's true that it sounds like something that would come out of Eduardo's mouth, really. Mark smiles too, just slightly, his lips moving over Eduardo's warm skin, and then he steps back and shucks his clothes, watches Eduardo do the same, lets him push him backwards slowly onto the bed, on his back. They crawl beneath the sheets and Eduardo kneels over his body and kisses him so slow and deep that Mark gasps when they break apart.

He should be touching Eduardo everywhere, but somehow his hands seem to keep gravitating back toward his face, his cheek, the hair at his temple. Eduardo skims his palm flat down Mark's stomach toward his cock and Mark wraps a leg around Eduardo's hips and pulls him in tight, a sudden rush of heat at the friction between them. Eduardo groans, drops his head, ruts hard against Mark. His body collapses until they're chest to chest and they're just moving, gasping against each other's cheeks. Mark stares at the ceiling, eyes wide and dizzy. He looks at Eduardo.

"Come on," he says, heady, shifting so his legs fall almost as wide apart as he can make them. He'd like to keep Eduardo pressed up against him with his one knee crooked forever but there are other things to move on to, here, and so he reaches over to the bedside table and fumbles in the drawer and thrusts everything into Eduardo's hands.

"Are you sure?" Eduardo says, looking at him with his most incongruous concerned mother face, and Mark rolls his eyes, and when Eduardo continues to study him he says, as clearly and directly as he can with alcohol and fear and want and the desperate, breathless closeness of Eduardo fogging his brain, "I want you to."

"Okay," Eduardo says, and he lets out a long, slow breath.

"If you want to," Mark adds in a rush. Maybe it's not like that. He doesn't know how many people Eduardo's been with before and he doesn't really care to think about it at all, not when this is what matters most, when they're the only thing like this that's ever mattered.

"Yeah," Eduardo says, and he presses his hand hard up the side of Mark's thigh, his hip, nudging around to cup his lower back right at the shallow curve of his ass, "I do, I do," and he sounds like he means it, all breathless and adorably nervous and weirdly humble, and Mark could listen to him forever, wants to spend lifetimes trying to understand him.

"Wardo," he murmurs when Eduardo nudges his hips up and slips a pillow under them, and he thinks for just a second that it's times like this he likes being taken care of, likes the way it feels to have Eduardo's hands on him so soft and cautious. He grimaces slightly when Eduardo slides the first slick finger in, and again at the second, trying to breath normally, holding Eduardo around the shoulders. But soon enough he's moving his hips kind of at random, trying to find more of that _something_ in there, and then Eduardo crooks his fingers and something white-hot sparks through Mark's whole body.

"Wardo," he gasps, "Wardo," and it happens again, and then again, " _Jesus._ " Mark's voice is high and strained and he can't decide if he wants Eduardo to keep hitting that spot forever or to stop before he actually dies.

Eduardo licks his lips and then there's a third finger and Mark arches into it, throwing his head back, mouth falling open. "Tell me," Eduardo says, breathless, and he twists his fingers just enough so that Mark shudders helplessly, "tell me how it feels."

" _Wardo_ ," Mark says, he's never realized before how good it could feel to just say one word over and over like that, "it's – _ah_ ," he gasps as Eduardo does it _again_ and God, he's really not going to make it if this is the pace they're setting, "fucking good, Wardo, it's so good." He shakes his head back and forth, rolling it across the pillow, almost trying to dilute the feeling as though he can somehow make it last longer. He wants Eduardo's hand on his cock but he doesn't, he wants to touch himself but he wants to have it just be this, he wants everything. The deeper in Eduardo pushes his lube-slick fingers the sweeter that ache is somewhere deep inside of Mark, the more he needs it and the less he can take it at the same time.

He feels Eduardo's lips at his neck, right above the hinge of his jaw, and he's almost completely gone, hazed over with breathless pleasure, but he's still lucid enough to think he hears Eduardo say _shhh_ very quietly as he keeps just fingering him into fucking oblivion.

He turns his face, grazes his teeth over the shell of Eduardo's ear, his whole body shaking. "Please," he whispers, and it feels like the only time in his life he's ever meant it.

Eduardo pulls his hand away and Mark's hips buck slightly, and then there's a condom and more lube and Mark is hooking his ankles behind Eduardo's thighs, touching his chest and the line of his collarbone, the rise of muscle in his shoulder, the hard plane of bone behind it, all with unsteady fingers as Eduardo lines up, slides a hand down Mark's thigh, stroking along the underside of his knee so that Mark shivers with his whole body.

"You tell me if…" Eduardo murmurs, and Mark nods before he's even finished the sentence.

"Come on, now," he says, nudging with his feet.

"Alright, alright." Eduardo smiles hazily, and Mark threads his fingers into his hair, and then Eduardo's setting one hand tight at Mark's hip and one at his ribs and he's pushing against Mark, slow and blunt and then in, just a little, enough so that Mark's thighs tense and his fingers curl against Eduardo's skull, but when Eduardo says, "Okay?" he nods.

"Move," he grinds out when Eduardo keeps giving him that ridiculously worried look, and Eduardo responds by leaning in and kissing him, a little messy, licking his mouth open on shaky breaths as he keeps pushing into him half an inch at a time, so slow it's excruciatingly good, and Mark feels completely stretched and nearly split open but it's like Eduardo's hands on him are holding him together, keeping him in one piece. He's numb all over and at the same time he feels like every nerve ending is alight. A little whimper escapes without his permission into Eduardo's mouth, a desperate, wrecked sound that sounds like it could never belong to him.

" _Mark_ ," Eduardo gasps and then Mark feels his hips, feels him all the way in and it is incredible. They stay like that for a moment kind of looking at each other, hot and panting, and Mark doesn't know why this feels so different besides the obvious reasons and then he does know and then he's thinking about it again all of a sudden, about tomorrow, and he pulls Eduardo in, chokes out _move_ and Eduardo does, finding a slow rhythm that speeds up quickly and Mark is wrapped so tight against him at every point that he has no choice but to meet every thrust, and he feels so full and so on that edge of some kind of pain that he doesn't know if he's going to be able to stand it except Eduardo keeps saying his name, and then he says, "talk, Mark," and Mark can do that, he thinks he can try to do that.

"Wardo," he says, half a moan, just what comes out when he opens his mouth, "I, I, can you – Wardo, I need – harder, God, I need you," he pants into Eduardo's skin, and he wants to reach up and grab at the headboard or the top of the mattress or anything for more purchase but he doesn't want to touch Eduardo any less than as much as possible, but Eduardo moans, loud, shakes his head but picks up his pace, both his hands at Mark's waist now, his lips wet and haphazard over the flushed skin of his neck, driving his hips into the backs of Mark's thighs hard enough to feel like it's bruising and Mark loves it, he's still wavering on that fine edge between pleasure and pain and all of it is deep-seated and consuming and Eduardo, Eduardo, Eduardo, he's chanting it on every breath, barely intelligible.

His hand gripping around the knots of Eduardo's spine, he pants, "Just like that," egging Eduardo on with his knees, hearing him make a little noise on each thrust, high and wild in his throat, and Mark blurts, "You're incredible," and, "please," again, even though he's not sure what he's asking for anymore. He's close enough that he thinks almost anything is going to do him in at this point. His mouth has gone slack against Eduardo's jaw and he's gasping on every thrust, just trying to cling on.

He feels Eduardo fumbling a hand between them and he knows this is going to be it – and Eduardo only brushes the heel of his palm over Mark's cock, and Mark comes, a long, slow arch, blooming out and filling his body straight through to the tips of his fingers until he's bursting with it, until he actually cries out.

It takes him a long moment to open his eyes after, and when he does, heavy-lidded, breathing in long thick gasps, he sees that Eduardo's been watching him the whole time, his face flushed bright along his cheekbones. He strokes a hand down over Eduardo's ear and along his shoulder, and Eduardo drops his head with a groan and thrusts, hard, three more times, before he comes into Mark.

They pant against each other for a moment, all sated limbs and damp skin and slowing heartbeats, before Mark's brain, very much sobered up all of a sudden, registers the stickiness everywhere and he disentangles himself to stumble to the bathroom and clean up, trying not to think too hard.

When he comes back, Eduardo is just lying there in his bed, the pillows all grouped in the middle. He has one arm slung over the sheets and he's looking up at the ceiling with only the tiniest hint of trepidation on his face, like if he doesn't think about what he's got to go and do tomorrow and who knows when after then he won't have a care in the world.

And it hits Mark then. This is where Eduardo belongs. He almost laughs out loud – because he knows it hasn't even been half a year (but Jesus, long enough in its own right) and there's no way he knows everything there is to know about this amazing person, and he doesn't know how to even try to find out because he's never wanted to find out with anyone else. But with Eduardo he wants the chance to try. He wants every day there is to try, he wants to find out everything and still have time to find out more. With Eduardo – he feels like he has something that he's never been able to have before, something for another part of himself, something real and important and different than anything he's thought of as real and important before.

He just can't imagine ever seeing anyone else lying in his bed in the dark, staring at the ceiling, his absurd hair mussed against the pillow, his fingers moving softly against the top of the sheets.

"Eduardo," he says softly, a note of amazement in his voice. He goes and sits cross-legged on the bed, pulls the sheets over his lap, staring intently. Eduardo looks up and raises an eyebrow.

"I…I think I'm in love with you," Mark says. The words sound anxious. Eduardo blinks at him.

"Was it that good?" he says with a little off-kilter smile. Even so, Mark can tell he knows what's really going on – there's something in his eyes, a dawning sort of wonder.

Mark swallows and tries again.

"I love you," he says clearly. He meets Eduardo's eyes and sees them soften into emotion, blurring in quick succession, surprise and happiness and gratitude. Eduardo's hand is resting on top of the sheets and Mark reaches out and takes it in his owns because he thinks he probably ought to. His heart is pounding so hard it's painful. He can feel it all the way through him, against the bed where he's sitting, against Eduardo's fingers.

"I love you too," Eduardo says, and his face splits, finally, into a huge smile. "Mark," he says, shaking his head. "God."

"I don't expect you not to go to Miami," Mark adds in a rush, because he doesn't want pretense to ruin this, he wants it to all be out there, and he's glad to see that Eduardo's face doesn't fall. "I don't expect – anything."

"I appreciate that," Eduardo says. It sounds like he means it.

"So, I just thought that maybe when you got back we could talk about…us," Mark says, rubbing his thumb slowly over the backs of Eduardo's fingers. "And what this is. But for now I kind of just want to sleep."

Eduardo nods and smiles softly, tinged with sadness, but in an accepting way, a way that Mark can live with. "Yeah," he says, "that all sounds – really good."

Mark nods, and then he nudges Eduardo to the side gently, and he curls against him beneath the sheets like he's grown used to. He lets himself imagine it, just for one second – that this could be _it_. It makes him dizzy, and he smiles into Eduardo's chest, and then Eduardo tips his chin up and kisses him for a long moment. There's such an element of pride in his face when they pull apart that Mark thinks, _give me a little credit._ And he knows this isn't going to up and fix everything, but he also knows that it's truly, finally now, the most he can do – and somehow he feels okay about that.

Eduardo's chest rises and falls slowly against his forehead where it's leaning, and Mark is smiling as he falls asleep.

***

Eduardo wakes up first in the morning, but Mark's eyes are open as soon as he feels the mattress rise on the other side of the bed.

"Not so fast," he says groggily, rolling over and grabbing Eduardo by the wrist and tugging. Eduardo stumbles and falls back, half in Mark's lap.

"Mark," he whines, "I'll be late," and Mark mutters into his mouth, "I'll drive fast," and he pulls Eduardo across his thighs.

They don't talk about it, not last night, not anything, but they come close – Eduardo straddling him, panting as he rolls his hips, palms braced flat on Mark's chest. Mark groans as Eduardo lifts up and drops back down, shoulders digging into the mattress as he arches his back, squeezing his eyes shut. He feels Eduardo's fingers curl against his skin, hears him gasp out, "Look at me," and when he does it's almost painful, the sheer intimacy of the way Eduardo's eyes on his, all the burning intensity of his blown pupils and his flushed face.

Mark sits up suddenly, one arm coming around behind Eduardo's back, holding him in his lap as he keeps moving, shuddering, and Mark's lips fumble over his cheek and their foreheads are tipped together, a sheen of sweat, fluttering eyelids, breathing over each other's mouths, and Mark can barely stand to look at him so close but he makes himself do it, Eduardo's eyelashes against his temple, until there's absolutely nothing else in the universe.

After, Eduardo is stressed out because they're running late to his insanely on-time definition of late, and Mark gets the sense all his rushing around is so that he doesn't have to look at Mark or face anything about that half of this whole situation because he doesn't want to get upset. Mark supposes he should be grateful in a way, but the end result feels more like a stomach cramp.

Back at Eduardo's place, Mark sits in the living room with his laptop and a piece of toast while Eduardo gets ready, both of them tight-jawed and edgy-eyed. Mark thinks it's more the daylight than anything that's making them this way, the countdown to their drive to PAO, than it is last night. It's not that Mark didn't mean it. Terrifyingly, it's anything but that. Most of all it's probably the fact that down the hall, Eduardo is finishing packing a garment bag of suit jackets that could still, somehow, impossibly, take him to New York.

Mark just hates the uncertainty. He hates being out of control. But the ball is in Eduardo's court now, undeniably. Mark only hopes Miami does the right things to him.

"I'll let you know when I land," Eduardo says as they pull up to departures.

"How long again?"

"Three nights."

Mark tries to keep his face flat, but he feels certain things coming through in his eyes as he leans over and kisses Eduardo briefly on the lips. He has no idea what to say. He tries to smile. Eduardo touches him lightly on the wrist.

"Que será, sera, remember?" He laughs.

"Wisdom beyond your years," Mark deadpans. Eduardo smiles down at his lap, and then he kisses Mark again, and then he's gone, too quickly, as though he didn't want to give himself the chance to do anything else. Mark watches him pull his stuff out of the trunk in the rearview, and he lifts a hand in farewell.

He thinks about _que será, sera_ as he drives straight to the office – Saturday, when not much is going on, but there'd been an email from Chris this morning saying they needed to talk and could they meet up there – and it makes him feel better but not good. What he wants to _sera_ would have been Eduardo never going anywhere in the first place.

***

Predictably, the disasters start right around the time that Eduardo is probably taking off.

"I got the email a few days ago, about that they'd like me to do it, but I've just been sitting on it," Chris is saying, as Mark grits his teeth so hard he thinks he might break his jaw. A letter of resignation is sitting on the conference table between them. "But I've thought it over and it's what I want to do."

"The Obama campaign," Mark says flatly. "Really, Chris? D.C.?"

"Or Chicago, I'm not positive yet," Chris says. He folds his arms. The gesture isn't hostile, but it makes it clear that he isn't negotiating. "This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, Mark."

"Yeah," Mark says heavily. He shakes his head, sighing. "No, way to go, man, really. Saving the country with social media." He flicks his eyebrows.

"It's a brave new world," Chris says, smiling slightly. "And hey, I don't think you guys will miss me much. I don't do anything that's actually my job anymore, anyway."

"But wherever will I find another gay whisperer?"

Chris grins. "I'll be sure to pass on the secret art on to Dustin."

"And you'd better tell him he's not allowed to leave," Mark says. "I need him around, if one of the original crew is taking off. "

Chris gives a theatrically nostalgic sigh. "Seems like only yesterday we were in Kirkland, counting pageviews, talking about—"

"Alright, alright," Mark says. He doesn't do nostalgia. But after an awkward moment of consideration, he sticks out his hand.

Chris laughs and takes it, schooling his features into seriousness. "It's been a pleasure, Mr. Zuckerberg," he says.

"You were always expendable anyway," Mark says, equally seriously. They both stare at each other for a moment before grinning.

"Our first Harvard casualty," Mark sighs.

"Actually," Chris says, "speaking of casualties."

"Jesus, Chris, you're full of good news today."

"You're not really gonna care about this one, I doubt you even know the guy's name."

It transpires that Chris is taking the CFO with him on the campaign trail, because they need someone who knows fundraising or online advertising or something and Chris figured it wouldn't be too much skin off Mark's back, which is true – the CFO is a guy in his early 40s, hired by HR with Mark's input amounting to little more than a glance over his resume and a signature, whose name Mark did not, indeed, remember. Mark has always tried very hard not to have to care about or deal with the financial sector of the executive board.

"Though I guess technically this means I need a CFO," he says dispassionately as Chris gets up to leave.

Chris shrugs. "Shit, hire Eduardo for all I care," he says. "Now, if you'll excuse me, Dustin and I have my going-away party to plan."

The glass door clicks shut behind him, but Mark stays sitting frozen in the empty room like Chris just dropped a brick on his head, his ears ringing with two words: _hire Eduardo._ It takes an intern sticking her head in to ask if they can use the projector, and also is he okay? to snap him out of it.

"I'm fine," he tells her, standing up. "I'm great." It's all he can do to stop himself running to his computer, his mind a dizzy buzz of excitement.

***

It takes Mark about an hour of frantic LinkedIn and bylaws searching to calm down, and then he calls Chris.

"I wasn't serious," Chris says. He sounds genuinely alarmed.

"I know," Mark says dismissively. "But it's completely plausible." A moment of silence. "Isn't it?" he adds, slightly impatient, because he knows it's a good idea, he doesn't need Chris to confirm it. Not really.

"It is," says Chris cautiously after a pause, "but—"

"He's got the credentials. We know he's competent. He already has ties to the company," and Mark ignores Chris' quiet cough, "and in the shares. And we need someone who's able to focus on investments, because that's where we are right now, right?"

"And advertising," Chris says, like it's apropos of nothing.

"One thing at a time," Mark edges, and when there's silence again, he says, "Well?"

"You just need to be sure," Chris says, "that you want to do this for the right reasons."

"Of course I do," says Mark brusquely.

"Like, for the benefit of the company and not because of – other things."

"I wouldn't hire him just to keep him here if I didn't think he'd make a good CFO too," Mark says. "I mean – no. No. I mean that I wouldn't jeopardize the company."

"I know," Chris says, but there's still that irritating note of concern in his voice.

"Say it," Mark says. "You have something to say, say it."

"Okay. I'm sure you know how this is going to look, so you must not be worried about that. But I don't think you're thinking about what Eduardo's going to say."

"I don't think he really wants to go to New York."

"But…I feel like it's more complicated than that." Chris pauses. "I don't know. Just, with his father, and I know you think he lets him walk all over him but _this_ isn't exactly his own choice either, is it?"

"It's not like I'm locking him in the office and forcibly appointing him CFO for life," Mark says exasperatedly.

"Not exactly."

"It's not!"

"Look, whatever," Chris says. "Just try to put yourself in his shoes, you know? And…" He sighs. "Well, let me know how it goes."

"Yeah," Mark says. "Thanks."

Chris just doesn't get how important this is, Mark thinks after he hangs up. He stares down at his hands on the keyboard. Eduardo will understand. Facebook is the right place for him, a good place. The people are better here, and the work is good work, important work – Mark needs someone like Eduardo doing work like that. Eduardo's young, and he's got the right ideas. He'll do so much better in Silicon Valley where everyone has the whole future of the industry ahead of them than he would on Wall Street with the suits and the wives and the steak dinners. The whiskey sours. And his father...Mark knows that's not what Eduardo wants. He wants to be out here. Mark wants him out here.

"I know what it looks like," he mutters to himself. He doesn't care. Facebook is his. He can make the decisions, he's perfectly capable. Eduardo isn't in his 40s, but it's a young company – and there are plenty of people in their 40s in the wings, enough for Mark's liking. He's willing to take a chance, if that's how people are going to want to see it, even though it's not a chance. He feels – sure.

He knows there's another facet to this, of course, beyond New York, beyond the industry, but he can't bring himself to consider it. It just – it confuses him to put Eduardo and – and last night, and all of that alongside the company in his mind. He doesn't know how to fit them together.

It's like a puzzle, this strange new sweep of his life. There used to be just one thing, the company. Now it feels like there's so many things trying to form that same picture. Even though he knows there's not that many. Just Eduardo.

So maybe this is how it all fits, bringing Eduardo in. Maybe this is the answer.

Mark fucking hopes so.

***

He makes Dustin meet him down the street from the office for lunch and waits patiently through about twenty minutes of the epic plans for Chris' epic going away party before opening his mouth to bring the conversation around to the real issue at hand. Then something occurs to him.

"It sucks about Chris," he says cautiously.

"It's going to be a great job." But Dustin's voice sounds rehearsed, and Mark can see something off about his face, which he knows must mean it's really apparent if even he can tell.

"Are you, um," he says, and Dustin just shakes his head.

"It's fine," he says. "I like being a third wheel to you and Wardo. It's going to be awesome. Maybe I can move in with you guys."

Mark purses his lips.

Dustin sighs. "No, you know, I feel like this was always going to happen," he says. "With someone. People drift off."

Mark nods.

"He's taking David with him," he says.

"Who?"

"Yeah," Mark pushes a sandwich crust around his plate. "He's the CFO. I didn't really remember his name either."

"Oh," Dustin says. "Um…okay?"

"I thought Eduardo might be a good fit," Mark says in a rush before he can stop himself, "for that position, I thought, I thought we could hire him."

It takes a few seconds for Dustin's face to catch up. He glances down at the table, opens his mouth, blinks a couple of times. And then he says, "Are you serious?"

"It was Chris' idea," Mark says defensively, and he's immediately annoyed with himself for feeling like he has to explain this to everyone. He doesn't know why he hasn't just gone ahead and done it already. It's not precisely that he's afraid he'll lose his nerve – or afraid that when Eduardo lands and Mark talks to him on the phone, everything will somehow fall apart.

Not precisely, anyway.

"I mean," Dustin says, with the tone of one trying to give fair consideration to something ridiculous just to be polite, "I guess he...knows about money, and stuff."

"He does," Mark says. Dustin takes a dubious bite of his taco salad. "He does!"

"No, I know," Dustin says, placatingly, "Like, I understand the logic. It makes sense in an objective sort of way. But…" he grimaces. "I'm just not sure if Wardo's going to be so into it."

"You and Chris both." Mark scowls.

"I know it's tough for you to imagine anyone ever not wanting to work at Facebook, happiest place on Earth, Disneyland of Palo Alto," he sweeps his hands theatrically through the air, "et cetera. But, you know, Wardo wants to do his own thing."

"False," Mark says, snapping his fingers and pointing, a jumpy sort of habit he retained from Harvard. "If he wanted to do his own thing he'd be here instead of in Miami. Or New York."

"Not here necessarily," Dustin says. His voice is actually gentle, and it makes Mark's stomach knot up a little. "I mean, he could be anywhere."

Mark can't bring himself to state the obvious about what else there is for Eduardo in Palo Alto, so he stays silent, looking at Dustin under a hard brow.

"I'm just saying," Dustin says after a moment, "I don't think he's gonna want to let you just give him a job."

"I'm not—"

"Yeah, but you are," Dustin says flatly. "Just 'cause he deserves it doesn't mean…you know."

"Whatever," Mark says sourly. "I'm asking him about it. Just – at least."

Dustin considers him for a moment, and then his face breaks into a little grin, apparently in spite of himself. "It'd be cool, though," he mutters, a concession. "Having Wardo in the company. Not just…the two of us."

"Right?" Mark says, but he doesn't smile. The excitement isn't waning on this idea, necessarily – it's still wildly perfect, still filling him with nervous anticipation, with this strange urge to cross his fingers under the table. But there's reality trickling in now –other things to face that aren't as wonderful as what he wants to focus on. There always are.

He looks at his watch.

"Wardo's landing soon." He stands up and tosses some cash on the table.

"You gonna call him?"

Mark nods once, and Dustin raises an eyebrow.

"Have fun," he says.

"Yeah," Mark mutters as he walks out. If everyone else's annoying opinions are any judge, he expects he will.

***

Mark has, predictably, completely psyched himself out by the time he picks up the phone. He's sitting in his kitchen in with a light fall chill pressing itself against the windows, watching and listening, everything outside wet and darkening too early, and he thinks he's not sure he likes these nerves that set in so easily every time he finds himself in a situation like this. He thinks, why is it only Eduardo? But he knows the answer to that.

And he knows he should learn not to go through every day of all of this as though something could pull them apart at any moment, as though Eduardo could just up and leave like he was never there, as though it never – meant anything, like Mark could just as well go back to how things were before. Flat. Paper-thin. Speeding by, the wind knocked out of him all the time, and he had never even realized it.

Mark rubs a hand over his eyes. Not asking would be worse than asking, he thinks. He wants to do Eduardo the credit of believing that he'd want the job. It's a place to start, anyway.

There's a frazzled, careworn quality to Eduardo's voice when he answers the phone, one that Mark has come to associate with Miami and with his family, and Eduardo's barely left the airport yet, so that doesn't bode well.

"The flight was fine," Eduardo says. There are airport sounds in the background, a rush of air and a honk, indistinct rumblings. "Sorry—" he goes distant for a second and Mark hasn't even said anything yet. A car door slams. He hears Eduardo saying something, probably to a driver. Maybe this isn't the right time – Jesus, of course it isn't, Mark doesn't know why he ever—

But then Eduardo's back. "Hi," he says on a sigh, and Mark grimaces. "Yeah, I'm headed home now. It's still hot here. I don't know, there's not much to report."

"Cool," Mark says emotionlessly. "I—" he wrestles with himself for a moment. The other end of the line is much quieter now, and this seems all at once like far more of a possibility than it had when Eduardo first picked up. He almost wishes he'd been able to retain the excuse of the noise, the running around.

"Can I ask you something?" Mark says. "This is going to seem like a weird time, probably, I don't know, I just want to ask you before I—whatever. I just had an idea."

"Lay it on me," Eduardo says. God, he sounds so tired already. He sounds like Mark sounds all the time. Mark doesn't get how he survives these trips if this is par for the course just off the tarmac. And he doesn't get why he wants to, more to the point.

"Alright. Hear me out," Mark says, gritting his teeth at the instinctive defensive move, and he launches into it before he can change his mind – just a sketch, just floating it, just nudging it gently across the table. He explains about Chris, the move to Chicago, about the vacancy it's creating.

"And I was kind of thinking that – that you might be the person for that job," he says, voice going all soft at the end of it. "If you wanted a place at Facebook. I know it sounds kind of big, because it is. But – I can't imagine anyone—" he swallows. Eduardo hasn't said anything.

"So I just wanted to ask," Mark finishes meekly.

A pause for a moment, and then Eduardo kind of laughs, affectionately, like he's probably shaking his head where Mark can't see him. "You're kidding, right?"

"Why does everyone keep saying that?" The words are out before Mark can stop them.

"I mean, because it's a ridiculous idea," Eduardo says. Mark doesn't respond. "You know that, right, that it's ridiculous? You can't just bring a random investor into the executive board because there's an opening."

What Mark wants to say is, _if you put it that way, doesn't it sound like you can?_ But what he actually says – rather, blurts, is – "You're not random."

There's another stretch of silence, and then Eduardo says, slightly more levelly – "I, uh, Mark, I don't know. I mean – I guess – we can both think about it, okay?" Mark tries very hard not to hear dismissal in that, though he doesn't hear anger either, but maybe there wouldn't be anger if Eduardo isn't even putting any weight by this.

"I'm really not kidding," he says.

"But you know you can't just give me a job," Eduardo says, and there's a thin, hard little edge to his voice now, a little more noticeable under all the humoring. "You know that's not how it works. Right?"

Mark doesn't say anything, and after a moment he hears another voice from somewhere on Eduardo's end. Eduardo says something back, muffled – Portuguese? – and then he says into the phone, "Mark, I've got to go, but we'll, uh, we'll talk about this, alright? You – you think about it. I'll talk to you soon."

"Okay," Mark says, thinking privately that he's only agreeing to talking, not to thinking.

He reasons that it could have gone a lot worse, once he hangs up, if Chris and Dustin are even in the ballpark. But he stays in the kitchen for a long time afterward anyway, staring unseeingly, unsmilingly at the coffee pot.

***

Mark is asleep on the couch with his computer on his lap when his phone rings. He starts, nearly sending his laptop tumbling to the floor, and answers reflexively without even looking at the caller ID.

"Hello?"

"Can you explain this plan of yours to me again?" Eduardo's voice is rough around the edges, and Mark's heart gives a singular surge at the sound of it before he rubs a hand over his eyes and sits up a little.

"What time is it?"

"About midnight on the west coast," Eduardo says. Mark looks over at the glowing numbers on the cable box. It's after three a.m. in Miami. "Did I wake you?"

"It's okay."

"It's just that I had a chance to think about what you said on the phone after everyone went to bed here," Eduardo says in a rush, "and I just, I want to understand it."

"Anything in particular?" Mark says, pinching the bridge of his nose.

"The part where you hand me a job on no merits just because you don't want me to move to New York," Eduardo says.

He doesn't sound angry; if anything, it's worse. There's a sense of hurt so strong it feels like it's reaching through Mark's chest and coiling, slow but relentless, around his heart – or something more penetrating, like his center of gravity, his stability where he sits. Eduardo's quiet, pained speech squeezing the air out of him, saying so plainly it comes as a shock, _what are you thinking?_

"That's not it," Mark says. His voice is tense and clipped with a kind of fuzzy adrenaline that's starting to trickle through his limbs, setting him on the sharp edge of anxiety. "There – you have merits. You have all the merits you need."

"But that's not the reason why," Eduardo says quietly.

Mark doesn't have a response to that for a moment, and Eduardo doesn't prompt him.

Finally Mark says, "Eduardo, I wouldn't ask you to be in the company if I didn't want you in the company and if you weren't the most qualified person for the position, and – if I didn't trust you and if I didn't want you there."

"Okay." A low exhale on the other end of the line. "Mark, really, truly, I appreciate the sentiment." Silence for a moment and Mark doesn't move a muscle. Then: "But the way it'll look – like I can't do anything for myself, like I'm being –" he stumbles over his words as Mark thinks _no, no_ ,"like it's just because it's easy, just taking a job from my, my—"

Mark only realizes he's holding his breath when he hears a rush of static from Eduardo.

"Your what," Mark says numbly, because he can't not ask.

"I don't know." Eduardo sounds exhausted, and for a moment Mark misses him so much it's like caving in on himself. "I mean, I don't – that's not the point," and Mark doesn't try to stop him veering back on topic because in all honesty his head is spinning from just that. "I wouldn't be earning that job, at Facebook, and—"

"You're a shareholder," Mark points out. "You know your way around our finances. And you know our strategies and the way it all works, who's involved—"

"But it's so high up," Eduardo cuts in, "and I'd just waltz in and, I mean, I just, can't you try to imagine how people would take that? What they'd say?"

"I don't care."

"I know," Eduardo says wearily. Silence again for a moment, and then he says, "But I'm not like you, Mark. I'm not – above all that, everyone's expectations, my own reputation."

"You mean for your father," Mark says, and when Eduardo doesn't answer immediately, he says, "I'm just saying, I mean, there's nothing wrong with it, or – I don't know, I'm just saying that that's who you always worry about what they'll think and what they want from you." Eduardo still doesn't say anything, and Mark finishes a little desperately, "But you're better than that, Wardo, that's why you should stay in Palo Alto, you should be able to do whatever you want, you should want to want that."

"I've told you it's not that simple," Eduardo says softly.

"I just never really understood why not," Mark says flatly. His eyes are itching with tiredness in the dark and he squeezes them shut for a moment.

"I know," Eduardo says again, and after a moment he adds, "I just do things a certain way, I do business a certain way. It's – different than other stuff."

Mark knows Eduardo is trying to distance this all from his father and it's not working. So he says, soft and a little stiltedly, "Remember when you said I was the only person who could get you to want to be in Palo Alto instead of Brazil?"

Eduardo breathes out a sad little laugh. "Mark," he murmurs. "Yeah."

"I really want you to come home," Mark half-blurts. His eyebrows are pinched, all anxious energy, and he closes his eyes in the dark.

After a long moment, Eduardo says, "I will in a couple of days."

"What did your dad say about New York?"

"Not much different from what he always says about these sorts of things. Except this one involves a relocation instead of just me leaving my money there. But I don't think that really matters to him."

"It matters to you," Mark says. He knows they're talking in circles but he can't help it.

"Of course it does." Eduardo's voice is low and warm with sleeplessness. "Mark—you know none of this is easy for me."

"I know."

"It's just – a lot to think about," Eduardo says, and that little pained thread has slipped back in. "God," he says suddenly, the bitter edge pushing through in earnest, "I can't," and Mark's pulse jumps momentarily, and Eduardo breathes out slowly, a whoosh of soft noise into Mark's ear in the quiet living room.

"I really don't know, Mark," he says finally. His voice is almost pleading, like he's saying _don't make me do this_. Mark doesn't know what to say. He feels so at sea.

"We can talk about it when you're back," he says finally. "It's fine. Do Miami. We'll talk about—everything."

"I miss you," Eduardo says quietly, half like he's admitting something and half like he just wants to make sure Mark knows. "I – I love you."

 _I miss you so much,_ Mark thinks. And aloud he says without hesitating, easy, a reflex, "I love you too."

It leaves his heart pounding, though, still.

"It's really late there," he says awkwardly after a moment.

"It's okay," Eduardo says, though he still sounds sleepy. "I'm on California time."

"Go to bed," Mark says. "Don't you have to go be a professional or something tomorrow?"

"It would seem that way." Eduardo yawns. "You should, too," he adds. "Bed."

"Yeah," Mark says in a completely unconvincing voice.

He can hear Eduardo smiling for the first time this whole conversation as he says, "I can't trust you to take care of yourself if I'm not there, can I?"

"It would seem so," Mark says, and his mouth quirks up in spite of himself.

There's silence for another long moment. The dark weighs heavy and soft around him, a big, empty blanket. "Alright. I'll call you soon," Eduardo says finally.

"'Night, Wardo."

One more pause that sends a strange pang through Mark's chest. Then Eduardo says, "Good night, Mark."

Mark breathes out long and slow after Eduardo hangs up, until his lungs feel flat in his chest and he has absolutely no energy left. But he still wakes his computer up and starts to work again, his fingers numb and his eyes hazy, barely knowing what he's doing, until he hears birds outside and it's Sunday and he sighs and gets up off the couch.

He means to take a shower and go into the office, but somehow he ends up in bed with his face pressed into the pillow and his eyes squeezed shut. He's running on fumes just lying here.

The bed feels so big. He breathes thick into the mattress, and he hopes, hopes, hopes, until it's like the only thing he knows how to do at all.

***

Mark only sleeps a few hours, but it's not for lack of trying – he's sluggish and drained when he wakes to the sound of the phone ringing and gropes for it in the midday half-dark of his bedroom.

It's Dustin. Mark flops back onto his pillow, an arm over his eyes, and listens to a stream of unstructured plans for Chris-related festivities – this coming week will be his last, of course, so the real party will be next weekend, but Dustin was thinking they should go out tonight, probably, and they'll do a real, expensive thing in San Fran on the Friday and then a house party on the Saturday if Mark's cool with hosting that. It occurs to Mark that party-planning is a good coping mechanism for Dustin, even if he sucks at it. He thinks that's the kind of thing Eduardo would probably say. Maybe he'd phrase it a little differently. He nods along and when Dustin says so, drinks tonight? he says, "Okay."

He hangs up and closes his eyes and when he opens them it's early evening and he'd fallen back asleep. He sighs, over-warm and muzzy and irritated, and decides he ought to move this party to the living room before he sleeps through the whole week. The house is huge and quiet even though it's never either of those things, it's perfectly reasonably sized and it's full of noise, the hum of the refrigerator, the tick of a clock somewhere. Strange, how Mark notices those noises now. He never had before Eduardo was around.

There are two things he cares about in his email: Chris' letter of resignation, and David's, the CFO's. They make his jaw tight to look at. He doesn't know why he's letting all the pressure of replacing them fall on him. There are people to do that – David got hired with very little involvement on his part, and Chris… well, it never really applied to Chris.

For just one solitary moment, Mark gives himself over to deep, stabbing, _I'm in my twenties and one of my best friends from college is leaving me and us and here and he takes care of so much shit for the company and for everything and he always knows what to do and I don’t know how to do anything, I don't know what to do about anything and fuck what the fuck are we going to do_ anxiety. And then he swallows and it's gone – though it doesn't escape him what that turned into at the end. He looks around the empty living room. His head aches, and he closes Chris and David's emails without looking at them again and goes to find some aspirin.

He has an unread text when he gets back.

_if you just give me a job like that my father's going to say it's bc i'm sleeping w you_

Mark stares at it. He reads it again, and a third time. His phone buzzes in his hand.

_he's going to say i was sleeping with you to get a job. that's it, idk what else to tell you._

Mark lets out a little helpless breath, looking away from the screen like it's poisonous, staring around the living room. His hands are shaking, and he fits them around the edges of his laptop to hold them still. He wants to drop his head into his hands and sob, dryly, until his throat is so raw he can't speak. He wants to go to Miami and wipe Eduardo's father off the face of the earth, and then take Eduardo by the shoulders and look him in the eyes and say, _see, see, do you see now?_

He texts back, fingers stiff, breath shallow in his throat.

_i'm not trying to make you choose. but i hope you know that's fucking ridiculous._

He hits send accidentally, curses under his breath, and writes another one:

_the job wasn't even open when we got together. if you know he's wrong i don’t get why it matters what he says._

He breathes steadily for a full minute, listening to the hum of the fan in his laptop, before his phone buzzes again.

_you are making me choose though_

And then:

_i don’t know, mark. we'll talk when i get back._

Mark replies, _okay_ , and then he calls Dustin. He thinks he probably ought to get drunk tonight.

***

The only reason he doesn't call Eduardo at the bar is because Chris takes his phone and mutters to him in a tone that does not invite objection that he needs to think about something else for a few hours. He tries his best. He drinks a lot, and listens to everyone talking, and his mind is smoggy and blank.

They're walking back to Mark's place after last call, just the three of them, and Mark thinks about how it used to be warmer at this time of night, and how once on this street Eduardo had nudged their shoulders together in the spring air and said, "I like you." His mouth twists.

"Mark." Dustin's face is drawn in drunken severity. "It's gonna work out."

Mark yawns, stretches, groans.

"Wait 'til he gets back," Chris says. "He'll remember. You know, with his dad and everything in Miami, like, being there – it's just hard for him to see."

"Apparently," Mark says tonelessly.

"But he will," adds Dustin, slinging an arm around Mark's shoulders, weaving slightly. Mark only stiffens slightly, and Dustin grins. "He's powerless against your innumerable charms."

"I hate you," Mark says, tipping his head back into the cool night air, eyes closed, stumbling over a crack in the sidewalk.

"No you don't," Chris says.

"No, I don't," Mark agrees.

"Excellent!" Dustin says. He attempts to initiate a kind of three-way high five that fails disastrously and makes Mark grin in spite of himself. The alcohol is like a fog that separates him more from Eduardo the less he thinks about him, about everything. Like if he just waved it all aside it would be waiting there for him to worry about again, but he won't. He'll worry in the morning, at work, if there's time. In the morning, he'll think of what he's going to say.

***

Monday becomes a work day, in and out of meetings, staring out a window at the first hints of fall colors in the trees on the lawn in front of the offices. Mark scowls and wishes for summer and then wonders when he became such a California person. Back in Cambridge, the trees this time of year made everything feel real – red and yellow reflected in the Charles along Memorial Drive, the bite in the air snapping him alert, bright and tannic in his lungs.

Weather like this feels better with someone's warm arm next to yours as you walk.

Though Mark doesn't really know. But he'd like to find out.

He watches his phone all afternoon in his office. It's getting to be early evening in Miami now, and he knows Eduardo said they'd talk when he got back but he doesn't want to leave it that way, to have tight-jawed text messages be the last word when Eduardo gets in his car at the airport tomorrow. He has this crazy feeling like Eduardo will make up his mind one way or another by the time he leaves Miami.

Eduardo doesn't call. Mark works until dusk, and it aches deep inside his ribcage, a dull, persistent discomfiture.

Alone in his house in the evening, he reads the texts over for what must be the thousandth time and feels his fingers tighten around the plastic edges of the phone. He _knows_ he's making Eduardo choose, but what fucking kind of choice is it? New York – just slogging on in pressure and that sighing sense of vague disappointment at the end of every day when he comes home and is only thinking, tomorrow, more of the same. Together, they have so much more than that. It's – Mark grits his teeth against the nervous clench of feeling in his stomach – it's like hope, like knowing that more of the same is more of something you've always been missing that now you have.

He stares around the empty kitchen. The house feels cavernous. He flips open the phone and scrolls in his contacts to E.

He still doesn't know what he's going to say. _I just want you here with me,_ he thinks, and there's something twinges in his chest – _I know you hate being this way and there's a simple solution._

_I don't understand how you can even consider leaving._

_I can't go back to the way things were before you._

A little noise of frustration claws its way up his throat and out past the roof of his mouth into the silence. He dials.

It rings, and rings, and finally goes to voicemail.

Mark's fingers twitch, the compulsive urge to hang up without leaving a message, but something makes him stay – maybe listening to Eduardo's voice, polite and professional. Then a beep, and Mark sits up a little straighter and opens his mouth.

"Eduardo, hi." He licks his lips, takes a breath. "I—I guess it's late there. But I just—you just need to hear this. It's – okay." There's a pause in which he thinks. "Look, you have the credentials for Facebook, and you're bright and motivated and you're – the best person I could ask for, for the job. And I'm fairly certain you know that you are, so what I, what I actually wanted to say," his speech is tripping over itself now, hiccupping, "was that it's not only that and it's not only that I want you to stay in Palo Alto, I'm asking you because I, because, because I'm in love with you, Eduardo, and, and I want—I want you to be happy. That's all." He takes a little breath, catching and tight in his throat. "So, I'll be there tomorrow," he adds, for good measure. "I'll. I'll talk to you soon."

He hangs up, feeling winded, his chest caving in as he exhales. He said what he meant, and he knows under the thin sheen of discomfiture that it was what he needed to say, like it had been fighting to take shape and get out of him all this time. But it makes him feel almost wild with nerves in a way, to have all that floating out there. He flicks the phone open compulsively, but there's nothing waiting for him, so he pulls up the code for the redesign and works on it until his laptop battery is critical, and then he moves to the living room and plugs in and keeps working until three a.m.

Eduardo doesn't call him back. But it's fine. It must be fine – Mark's trying so hard not to let it make his stomach churn. Because he's done everything he can possibly do now. He doesn't have the vocabulary to do more – which is saying something – or the emotional stamina, which is saying slightly less, but still. For every time he's thought that the ball is in Eduardo's court now, this time that's for real.

Tomorrow they'll see. Mark keeps telling himself this, as he falls in and out of sleep until about eight a.m., gets back up, showers, dresses, eats something – he thinks of Eduardo as he stands in the kitchen and something twinges inside him, even as it makes his chest feel warm, too – and drives to work. He feels like he's wearing blinders, on the sides and farther in front, to just before later today when he'll have to go to the airport. He's more than ready for this to get resolved, but he's not entirely sure he's prepared to hear what Eduardo has to say.

The office is a blur of slightly manic productivity. Mark's trying to keep himself occupied, and there's a lot to do because there always is, and a lot of talks and paperwork and bullshit about Chris and David leaving. But he also doesn't want to leave anything unfinished today. He's leaving for PAO in the early afternoon and he doesn't want to have to come back after he drops Eduardo off to finish something he'd started in the morning – he knows he hasn't given Eduardo a lot of time on this but fuck, it feels so urgent, and Mark is going crazy for closure. Not to mention, they're going to need a new CFO one way or another in the very near future.

Mark doesn't know what he's envisioning, though – that he'll drive Eduardo back to his place and they'll just talk it all the fuck through until it's solved?

Well – ideally, yes. Maybe if Mark just aims for that then shit will take care of itself. It's worth hoping for. He heads out around three p.m., and Dustin gives him a thumbs up from across the office.

He's waiting in the pick-up lane at arrivals when Eduardo comes out, tugging his suitcase behind him like it's a dead weight. He's got his trademark Miami look on, the one like he hasn't slept in weeks, like he's carrying a load of a thousand unsolvable problems on his shoulders. Mark hopes he's not contributing too much that, those dark circles under Eduardo's eyes, the unhappy slant of his mouth. Mark only ever wanted the best – for them both to be happy, for them not to worry. He can't understand how it's come to this.

He gets out of the car on impulse as Eduardo approaches, comes around the front to stand on the curb.

"Hey," he says.

Eduardo drops his bags next to the car. "Hey," he says, and he sounds so exhausted, and then he steps forward and puts his arms around Mark's neck.

Mark stiffens slightly just in surprise, but Eduardo's face is buried in the crook of his shoulder, and Mark puts his hands on Eduardo's back and breathes him in and it feels like the first time they've seen in each other in years. Mark searches for some artificial well of distance between them and doesn't find one. It's comforting. This is a good place to start, held against each other and feeling as close as they've ever been on the curb outside arrivals.

He smiles a little sheepishly when Eduardo pulls away, but as Eduardo smiles back Mark can see how much weaker it is than usual, like a bulb that's going out. He throws Eduardo's bags in the trunk and they get in the car.

The silence is thick and viscous as Mark pulls out onto the freeway and Eduardo's fatigue is rolling off of him in waves. Mark thinks about asking how the trip was, but they talked so much over the weekend it seems weird, and then he thinks he could ask about the flight but it seems horribly banal and then Eduardo says, "I got your message."

Mark swallows. Jump right to it, then. He nods, keeping his eyes on the road.

"I'm sorry I didn’t call back," Eduardo says. Mark shrugs gruffly, one-shouldered.

After a moment, Eduardo says, "Thank you for saying those things." He reaches out and thumbs lightly against the space at the hinge of Mark's jaw, and Mark keens into it only half-consciously. "And, and I love you too."

"I know." Mark glances at him and then back at the road.

"Mark, look," Eduardo says, and his voice is growing determined, like he's been working up to saying this for hours now. "Okay." He takes a deep breath. "I need to know that _you_ know that I don't want to go. That – that I want to stay here with you. But—wait," he says, holding up a hand as Mark starts to try to speak, "but there's more to it than that. I just, I need you to tell me that you know it's not just about what I want to do, about – what makes me _happy_ , it's more complicated than that, and that that matters to me, what's complicated about it, that's – real, and it might not matter to you but it matters to me and _that_ should matter to you."

His voice breaks a little at the end, the effort of saying so much. Mark's hands are tight on the steering wheel. He stares out ahead of him, feeling Eduardo's dark, anxious eyes on the side of his face. He frowns.

"I know that," he says finally. "It's complicated and of course you don't want to go." He glances at Eduardo, who's got a look like he's hanging on every word, and it makes Mark's throat a little tight. "I just wish you'd put what you want to do first above all the rest of that. That's it. But I…" he sighs, " _recognize_ what you're saying. And I'm trying, you know, to put myself in your shoes," he finishes, half-exasperated with how ridiculous the words sound and maybe more so with himself for struggling so much with them.

He knows instantly when he looks at Eduardo that it was the right thing to say, though, at least for now. The relief in his face, though it's the temporary kind, the topical, immediate anesthetic on a wound that goes much deeper and will take much longer to fix, makes Mark feel tired just seeing it, and he's a little cowed imagining how Eduardo must have felt leading up to now if that's what he looks like when they've finally gotten past it.

Eduardo sighs quietly and reaches out to curl his hand around the back of Mark's neck, squeezing lightly, looking at him without saying anything. Mark glances at Eduardo and away again, back at the road.

They make it back to Eduardo's without much other conversation – brief recaps of their relatively uneventful weekends, Eduardo glossing brusquely over the all parts with his father. Every quiet lull sets Mark's teeth on edge.

They pull up to the house in tight-wired premonitory silence. Eduardo's street is filled with filtered fall sunshine, washed over everything but too thin to be warm. They both look up at the house, and then at each other.

"Did you come from work?" Eduardo asks.

Mark half-nods, noncommittal.

"I should let you get back."

"It doesn't matter," Mark says flatly. He can see the circles under Eduardo's eyes thrown into wan relief by the sun as he looks up at the house again. He's almost mad at him for doing this to himself. _What's the point of being like this?_ he thinks.

Eduardo puts his hand on the car door.

"Why don't you come by after work?" he says. "When you're not busy."

"I'm not busy," Mark says automatically. What he means is that he's no busier than ever, which is actually very busy, but somehow he's almost always found he can make time for Eduardo. It's so weird how that happens, without him even noticing it, or minding at all.

"It's okay," Eduardo says. His voice is strained. He unbuckles his seat belt and opens the door and gets out. Mark doesn't pop the trunk. He rolls down the passenger window and leans over. Eduardo is looking down at him, tired but expectant.

Mark opens his mouth. "Wardo—" he says, and he's got to say something but he doesn't know what. He thinks he's run out of words. It's a stunning feeling. But the conversation doesn't stop just because he's at his wit's end with Eduardo, and he doesn't know what to do, and he swallows, and he's got to say something, _anything_ , so he says, "I love you."

It just seems like the surest thing, though he has to struggle not to let his voice break, and to keep the words steady in his mouth, to not let them fall apart. It feels almost like the first time, but he tries to say it like it's nothing, not even a reminder or a plea to let them be alright again. He doesn't tell Eduardo that he can count on two hands the number of times he's said those words – that each of the few times he's even said them to Eduardo it's been so scary and so _hard_ – because he knows that Eduardo thinks he's better than that, for no readily apparent reason. And he wants to be what Eduardo believes about him. Because what else does he have left to live up to, if not that?

Eduardo's gone all still outside the car door. He looks in at Mark with the weirdest expression on his face, such a tremulous mix of happy and upset that it's hard to read, though for Mark that isn't saying much. But he likes to think he has a decent handle on Eduardo. After all this time, he certainly ought to.

Mark keeps looking at him, tense and determined, until finally he sees his shoulders slump slightly.

"You could come in now," Eduardo says softly, "I guess, if you can."

Mark gets out of the car and shuts the door behind him and walks around the front. He keeps his eyes on Eduardo the whole time, brows knit. When he gets close enough, Eduardo reaches for his arm, and Mark steps into his space without looking away.

"I love you too," Eduardo says, looking into his eyes. The words come out so serious that Mark thinks it almost undermines them, the way Eduardo is so plainly trying to impress them upon him, as though Mark isn't going to believe it, like things could change that much that quickly. He holds Eduardo's gaze, straight-faced, and then nods once.

"I know," he says clearly.

Eduardo's hand trails down his forearm, over the bones of his wrist, thumb brushing over the skin. He twines their fingers together.

"Wardo," Mark says, "I said I know," and Eduardo kisses him, and it's everything Mark had known they were missing.

He pulls Eduardo in at the hips with both hands, steps back until he hits the car and lets Eduardo lean flush against him, pushing both his hands into Mark's hair behind his ears, biting softly at his lower lip. Mark holds on tight, because he wants this to last and because he's trying to stop himself shaking. It's not that he means those three words more, now, necessarily, or differently – it's just that they gain so much more traction like this, when they're not only adding onto a good thing or putting a name on something that already was that way. _Whatever works_ , he thinks, and he swallows hard and blinks his eyes open for a moment to meet Eduardo's, dark and shining and so close it's terrifying – and then he closes them again as he brings their lips together, lifting a hand to the back of Eduardo's neck, rubbing his fingers over the stiff knots of his spine, carding through his hair.

They're wrapped so closely together that it takes Mark a moment to notice that they've stopped kissing, once it happens – that Eduardo's lips have dragged over his cheek and have come to rest, mouth and nose and hard, ragged breath, against the hinge of his jaw. Mark presses his face into the side of Eduardo's neck, staring into nothing over his shoulder. He's combing a pair of parallel lines into his hair at the nape of his neck, two fingers, back and forth, like breathing.

He feels Eduardo sigh all shaky, and he shifts. They break apart, though they're still flush against one another, Mark pressed against the car, looking up into Eduardo's studious face.

He takes a steadying breath. "Do you want to go in?" he asks.

"Yeah." Eduardo nods like he'd forgotten. "Okay."

He picks up his bags, and Mark follows him into the house.

Eduardo shivers slightly when they're in the foyer. The house is grey, shades half drawn.

"Are you cold?" Mark says.

"Aren't you? It's almost October."

Mark shrugs. "It's all the same to me, here."

Eduardo smiles, that half-bemused, half-affectionate smile Mark has grown so accustomed to.

"Come sit down," he says.

Mark sits on the couch and smooths his palms over his knees. Eduardo sits down a cushion away, looking at him fixedly. Mark's whole body feels tight and brittle when Eduardo looks at him that way – spun taut with the overwhelming knowledge that there's a person right here who could want to see him with their eyes like that, like they're seeing everything about him, like they can read so much in the way he moves his eyes or in the angle of his shoulders, more than Mark even knows is there.

He wants to find a meaning in the contours of Eduardo's face, some great truth in the sketchlines of his hands and the slant of his mouth. He thinks he can do it, when he tries. He thinks they've come a long, long way.

He waits.

Finally Eduardo says, "I've gotta say this, alright?"

Mark nods stiffly.

Eduardo takes a breath, glancing away from Mark and back again, and then away at the window across the room.

"I want a lot of things." His voice is low and rueful in his throat. "But I'm not like you, Mark. I want things and—I can't have all of them."

"So do I," Mark says blankly.

Eduardo smiles at him, that sad little smile, and Mark feels a choking surge of panic. _You can't actually leave me,_ he thinks, _not after all this._ His hands tighten on his knees. He doesn't know what he's going to do. He waits for the bomb to drop.

"I'm not taking the job in New York," Eduardo says.

The words are soft and level, and it's like they hit physically at something inside of Mark, like the smog that's been polluting his lungs for days all rushes out at once. His whole body sags at the release. He opens his mouth to speak, everything tumbling forward – "Wardo—"

"But I'm not gonna be your CFO," Eduardo adds, quick, in that same gentle tone, and then there's no more air in Mark's lungs at all.

Now he doesn't know anything. His mind races forward for an excruciating moment – whether he should argue, if after all this time it's even worth it to keep trying once Eduardo's said that. Mark's got what he came for, if Eduardo's staying. If he's staying. If.

He swallows, jaw tight. "So – what—"

Eduardo's smile is small, and it would look like one of the sad ones if Mark didn't know him better. "I'm staying here with you," Eduardo says. Mark's breath catches in his throat. "That's what you wanted, isn't it?"

"I want –" Mark barely stops his voice from breaking, his speech staccato with conflicting emotions, everything so confused. "I want you do to—whatever it is you feel like _you_ want to do."

He looks down when Eduardo's fingers slide over the back of his palm, and then back up into his face. It feels so good to have him right here again that Mark almost can't think about what he's saying. He's staying, he says he's staying but Mark doesn't know who he's staying for and he didn't expect to feel like this, full of truly startling anxiety, like he wants to fold in on himself. Eduardo's right, it's what he wanted. Eduardo's staying. So Mark doesn't know—he doesn't understand—

"I want to stay," Eduardo says quietly.

"I," Mark starts, and then he has to pause and take a deep breath. He turns his hand over under Eduardo's fingers and folds them into his palm with his own, and then he turns and leans over and kisses him on a nervous, flighty impulse. Eduardo tips his mouth closer against Mark's like a reflex, the gentle cant of his neck, his breath rushing warm from his nose over Mark's cheek, the space between them feeling like it's shrinking down to nothing – and it makes everything feel better, like it can be okay again, like it might not have ever even been _not_ okay.

Mark pulls back, but only slightly. Eduardo's face is almost blurry in his field of vision, close enough for Mark lean forward and touch with the tip of his nose.

"If it's for you," he says haltingly. "I only ever wanted – what I asked, for you."

"It's for you, too," Eduardo says, and before Mark can speak he adds, "and that's fine, Mark – it's fine."

Mark bites his lip.

"What about your father?" he asks quietly.

That shadow passes over Eduardo's face, the one Mark recognizes, though it lingers less than in the past.

"He's angry," he says. "He said – some things, about – me. And us." The words sink hot into Mark's skin. "But Mai'll talk him around eventually, I guess. Or – or, well, it won't matter."

"Because you'll be here," Mark says.

Eduardo glances up at him through his lashes and then back down at their hands clasped together, as though he's not entirely seeing them. "Yeah," he says softly.

"You're lucky I didn't call your house or something, yesterday," Mark says. "I think I would have made things considerably worse for you if I'd talked to him."

Eduardo laughs like it's in spite of himself, kind of a broken little sound, and then, quite suddenly, he puts his arms around Mark's neck and tucks his face into the crook of Mark's shoulder and pulls him in. It takes Mark a few seconds to realize he's being hugged – or maybe that he's the one doing the hugging, it's unclear, and he's not sure why this feels revelatory anyway all things considered, but he slides close and wraps his arms around Eduardo and they sit there like that for what feels like a long time.

Eduardo takes a deep breath when he finally pulls back. It seems like it's only then he trusts himself to look at Mark again. He gives a rueful little smile.

Mark fidgets with the hem of his shirt. "So you really aren't going to take the job?"

"In New York?"

"My job."

"Oh." Eduardo sighs like he's steeling himself. "No," he says, "because—I wanted it all to be on my terms. And…" he smiles, off-kilter, "I didn't want you to have to be my boss."

Mark shrugs.

"I think things will be easier this way," Eduardo says quietly. "You don't know what you were getting us into."

"Okay," Mark says. He shakes his head, half smiling. "I – it doesn't matter. I guess." _I'm just tired of this._ "I'm happy you'll be here."

Eduardo's smiles, warm, perfect.

"Besides," Mark says, just to cover the moment, so Eduardo won't notice everything that just stuttered across his face, "you wouldn't have survived in New York. I think they'd revoke your Brazilian citizenship if you lost your tan."

Eduardo's mouth splits into a grin. "Good thing I have you to look out for me," he says.

"It is good," Mark says, relief finally coursing through him uncut by anything else, and he's grinning too, like he hasn't in what feels like so long. Like he might never, ever stop.

Eduardo grabs his hand when Mark stands up, but they look at each other for a moment and really, it's as though things are actually going to be okay for them. Mark supposes there was a little part of him that thought the illusion would shatter as soon as he moved.

"I'm going back for a bit," he says.

Eduardo lets go of him.

"Okay," he says. "Come back here when you're done?"

"Yeah." He lets his eyes linger on Eduardo for a moment before crossing to the front door.

With one hand on the handle, he turns back.

"Wardo," he starts, frowning slightly. Eduardo's face is so earnest that it makes Mark's heart skip to look at. He'd never met anyone who could make him feel that way, before this. He thinks he probably couldn't have come through the past few days as unscathed as he is with anyone else – and even that feels like a miracle, a little bit.

Eduardo does know how to bring out the best in him, though.

"What?" Eduardo's still watching him expectantly from the couch.

Mark smiles, a sheepish, genuine curve in the corner of his mouth.

"I'll see you later," he says. He's not worried anymore. And it's different from him having Eduardo and not being afraid to lose him – it's them having each other, and the certainty that that's here to stay.

Mark opens the front door and blinks for a moment in the autumn sun before stepping outside.

***

Eduardo falls asleep that night while they're curled against one another in bed, his head on the bony plane of Mark's shoulder. Mark doesn't think that seems very comfortable, but he lies still anyway, listening to the rhythms of their breathing chase one another in the silence. He's not very tired, somehow. He'd been wearing down at the end there, but it seems like being able to bury everything from the past few days has been an unburdening, in a way. Like now that he _knows_ , he can breathe again. Like he's surfaced.

He's not angry. Admittedly, it would be hard to be angry with Eduardo asleep against him like this. But he's not, he's weighing whether he should be and he's landing on fuck it, if Eduardo isn't meant for Facebook then he's not and here he is anyway and look how that just works out like that, perfectly, happily. He'll work on understanding – he thinks he understands some already anyway. And they'll have time.

He glances down at Eduardo in the dark.

"Did you know that I'm colorblind?" he murmurs, experimentally. His voice sounds loud in the silence, but Eduardo doesn't stir.

"You're the strangest person I've ever met," Mark says softly, so low and trembling that his voice breaks a little.

He's got one arm tucked beneath Eduardo's shoulders, and he lifts his hand to finger the hair at the nape of his neck, falling at random in tufts, mussed with traveling and sleep.

Around the tightness in his throat, he whispers, "Someday I'd like to go to Brazil with you," and he doesn't know why he's saying all this out loud, only that Eduardo makes him feel like he can.

"I'm awake," Eduardo mumbles into his chest.

Mark tenses. "Good," he says defensively, shifting beneath Eduardo's half-weight.

"We can go to Brazil," Eduardo says. He squirms a little, tucking himself more snugly against Mark until their cheeks are nearly level and he can plant a sleepy kiss on the side of his neck. "We can go anytime."

Mark rolls over against him, lips grazing his forehead just by proximity.

"And I could say the same about you," Eduardo murmurs, "and no, I didn't know."

Mark slides his nose into the warm space between Eduardo's temple and the pillow.

"Now you do," he says, so quiet it gets lost in the bedclothes. Eduardo doesn't answer, and judging by the gentle rise of his body against Mark's he might have fallen back asleep. Mark closes his eyes.

He counts breaths, until he doesn't anymore.

***

"I told you." Across the table, Dustin gestures sternly to Mark and Eduardo with a piece of sushi speared on a chopstick. The roll splits open and the fish inside falls onto the table. "Oops."

"All I ever wanted was for you to behave like a normal adult in public," Chris says, staring morosely at the lump of tuna. Mark grins slightly to himself watching the waiter judging Dustin as he comes by to refill their water glasses.

"Chicago is not gonna make an impact on how futile that mission was," Dustin says to Chris. He picks the tuna up gingerly between two fingers and pops it in his mouth. "What?" he says, as Chris sighs loudly. "Five-second rule."

It's early evening, Wednesday. They're trying to put the finishing touches on Chris' going away party plans, but between Mark's apathy and Dustin's short attention span, that isn't getting far.

"Wait, but told us what?" Eduardo says, looking at Dustin, then around the table in confusion.

"Nothing," Mark says, at the same time as Dustin says, "That you two would figure your shit out eventually."

Chris and Eduardo both smile.

"Figure our shit out," Mark repeats dryly.

"Well, really we told _him_ ," Chris says to Eduardo, nodding to Mark. "I think he needed to hear it more than you."

"I guess," Eduardo says, pursing his lips around a tremulous smile as he glances at Mark, whose eyes are determinedly fixed on the flowers in the center of the table.

"Aren't we supposed to be planning?" Mark asks tightly after a moment, but he catches Eduardo's eye when he glances up and can't help but grin to himself. His face feels warm.

The plan, insomuch as it exists, is basically to bar-hop until late, then move the party to Mark's house. Dustin wants to get a stripper to jump out of a cake, but Chris says they don't make those in "male," at which point Dustin tells him that you can get anything on the internet these days and Chris says he'll pass anyway, thanks.

Eduardo's staring at the two of them so fondly that it actually makes Mark feel a little sad. He kind of really liked this whole foursome thing. And now Chris is leaving – it's actually happening. With all the Eduardo-related fallout from the original Chicago announcement, he had managed to forget.

But he supposes it's a part of growing older or whatever. Everyone picks themselves up, moves around or settles new places, or just chooses to be where they want to be, for a lot of complicated reasons. It's bound to happen. Change comes. It's a fact of life.

Mark glances at Eduardo and smiles to himself, even though no one's looking at him.

***

Chris' going-away that weekend is spectacular and sloppy and everything a last hurrah should be, and at Mark's house Dustin gets very drunk and plants one on him, right on the lips, just past midnight. Everyone cheers and laughs and forgets about it quickly and Chris is spectacularly red and, and later Mark spots him giving Dustin a tight hug and whispering something to him that makes Dustin's face go slightly pinched.

They end up with the four of them again, sprawling out around the living room, one last time. Eduardo's in Mark's bed, Chris is on the couch, and Mark finds Dustin in the kitchen, drinking a glass of water and looking blearily subdued, the way the very drunk look in the late-night process of sobering up a little.

"What'd Chris say?"

"Now Mark, that's private," Dustin replies immediately, like it's meant to be a joke, but it falls flat. Mark just looks at him, until he sighs and says, "Just that he would miss me but that I was gonna be fine out here because I always am."

Mark's learned with Eduardo how to spot when people just need to talk things out themselves, and he keeps quiet.

"I know he's right," Dustin says. "It's just – weird. I dunno, I feel really static, sitting over here, like, watching him go." He looks at Mark curiously. "Like we're sort of gathering dust or whatever."

Mark shrugs. "Eventually it just starts being life."

Dustin raises a wry eyebrow. "Wardo teach you that?"

"Doesn't make it any less true."

"I think it makes it more true, actually."

Mark smiles slightly, and Dustin watches him with a pained sort of look on his face, like he's hanging on Mark's next words. Mark claps him awkwardly on the shoulder. "We're gonna be fine, man," he says, and it makes him feel better to see that, for whatever reason, that actually does seem to bring some relief to Dustin's face.

Dustin stumbles into the guest room and Mark stumbles into his own. Eduardo's already asleep, and Mark thinks he takes his jeans off, he isn't sure, before crawling half-under the sheets and passing out in his party-wrecked house down the hall from his two college roommates with his head on Eduardo's chest.

***

And Chris goes, he finally up and goes the next week. He's flying, having the rest of his stuff shipped (dashing Dustin's hopes that the four of them would take a wacky Cali-to-Chicago road trip, or "bro'd trip," as he calls it), but they all drive him to the airport anyway.

"Don't do anything I wouldn't do," Chris tells Dustin on the curb outside departures.

"Don't forget to make a new straight friend to provide you with important man advice like I do," Dustin replies, smiling weakly, and they look at each other for a moment before Dustin throws his arms theatrically around Chris' neck and Chris, after an extended, ridiculous hug, has to extricate himself delicately.

"Mark," he says, turning to Mark and Eduardo leaning against the car.

"Chris," Mark says, smirking.

"Keep fighting the good fight, man."

"Only for you."

After a moment's consideration, Mark gives him a quick hug, not because he particularly wants to but because he thinks Chris will probably appreciate it, and because, shit, this would be the moment. His chest hurts a little when he pulls away. He reminds himself that they all are more than able to fly around to see each other when they want to, but – well, still. They've been through a lot to get to this.

"And, Wardo," Chris says. He gives him a hug, and then hesitates.

"Take care of them," he says finally.

Eduardo smiles. "Always."

And then Chris wheels his bags inside and he's gone. Mark stands by Dustin on the curb, very aware of how neither of them really knows what to do with themselves.

"Um…pizza?" Eduardo asks, and they both nod, relieved.

***

September wanes crescent, the last few shortening days, quiet and growing a little chilly. Mark sits up mornings with Eduardo in bed writing code and sending emails while Eduardo reads the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, and when either of them gets fed up with the other working they pick up whatever is in the other's hands very deliberately and set it on the floor and roll over on top of them beneath the sheets.

Dustin says they should change their relationship status on Facebook. Eduardo doesn't care, and Mark finds that he doesn't really either, but they do it in the end just to stop Dustin harping. It's kind of nice, actually, to see Eduardo's name up there all the time. It makes Mark smile for no reason just sitting at his desk. And somewhat surprisingly, life goes on.

They find a new CFO, and Mark doesn't think much about him. He likes it when Eduardo comes in for shareholder meetings. In hindsight it feels better this way, not having Eduardo have to bring him things to sign, not having to send Eduardo tersely worded emails about advertising, not having Eduardo sitting on the other side of a conference room table from him. Eduardo's still in the office, anyway. He's a part of things. And it's so much easier to, like, be together – to be _them_ without all that other shit clogging up the works.

Chris checks in from Chicago. He tells them to turn on MSNBC at a certain time on a particular Thursday morning, and when they do they see him in the background of an Obama press conference and the whole office cheers. Dustin, meanwhile, has thrown himself wholeheartedly into this new project, the Farmville thing. It's…very Dustin. Mark lets him do what he has to do, and he seems happy, and he still brings over beer and they play Halo and everything does, in fact, appear to be about as okay as they ever could have hoped.

Eduardo moves in with him, quietly, on the first of October. He brings his own set of dishes and leaves all the furniture his father bought him behind.

The house feels different, finally, in the most miraculous way – like it's lived in, like they really _live_ there. Together. Like it's kind of a home.

Mark's mind reels at the thought that it's only been six months, all of this – everything, everything that matters in this brave new world of such a different kind of mattering than he's ever known before. There are times when it seems so fast, but other times – most of the time – when it seems so understandable, when Mark thinks back to himself around Eduardo in the spring and he smiles with the strange certainty that they never could have ended up anywhere but here.

And still, it's fantastic and humbling and incredible. He pulls Eduardo toward him by the waist in the kitchen while he's sorting his silverware into the drawer, one hand fitted at his hip and the other in his hair, their bodies a flush curve, and he kisses him, bites into his mouth and holds them tight together until they're both gasping.

They make stir-fry together that night, and afterward Eduardo sits on the couch staring out the window at the leaves turning on the big beech tree in the front yard.

"That was here when I moved in," Mark says, leaning against the wall, watching him.

Eduardo turns.

"It's nice," he says.

Mark looks out the window. The tree is filling the living room with long shadows and a golden glow, the yellow evening sun lighting up its leaves. In the winter it makes him think of Harvard, but now it feels like California, like a sense of permanence and possibility. Or that could be Eduardo sitting here by it, his features soft in the sunset, looking somehow like they've got all the time in the world.

"I never really noticed it much before," Mark says after a long moment.

Eduardo only smiles at him. Mark is pretty sure he could get used to this.

_fin._


End file.
